who is literate
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defines a literate person as ‘one who with understanding can both read and write a short simple statement on his or her everyday life’. It goes on to state: ‘Yet, there are many people who are literate in this restricted sense, but who none the less suffer serious problems with more complex reading and writing tasks. These are the functionally illiterate’. To be functionally literate a person must be able to ‘engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for the effective functioning of his or her group or community and also for enabling him or her to improve reading, writing, and calculations for their own and the community’s development’. Functional literacy is a relative measure rather than an absolute one. The same measure of skill may result in one person being considered functionally literate in one context and totally illiterate in another If we consider the matter more deeply we are all illiterate in one way or another. We may know English but not French or Finnish or understand a computer language. We may be able to read a page from a novel with joy, but be left in puzzlement by one from a statistics book. We may understand a map of our local bus system, but are left bewildered by a diagram of the electrical circuits within our own home. The simple dichotomy, ‘literate’ versus ‘illiterate’, does not adequately deal with levels of skill that run from zero to Shakespeare and vary from utter confusion in one sphere to easy mastery in another. Illiteracy is, therefore, not a completely foreign concept to any of us.
defines a literate person as ‘one who with understanding can both read and write a short simple statement on his or her everyday life’. It goes on to state: ‘Yet, there are many people who are literate in this restricted sense, but who none the less suffer serious problems with more complex reading and writing tasks. These are the functionally illiterate’. To be functionally literate a person must be able to ‘engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for the effective functioning of his or her group or community and also for enabling him or her to improve reading, writing, and calculations for their own and the community’s development’. Functional literacy is a relative measure rather than an absolute one. The same measure of skill may result in one person being considered functionally literate in one context and totally illiterate in another If we consider the matter more deeply we are all illiterate in one way or another. We may know English but not French or Finnish or understand a computer language. We may be able to read a page from a novel with joy, but be left in puzzlement by one from a statistics book. We may understand a map of our local bus system, but are left bewildered by a diagram of the electrical circuits within our own home. The simple dichotomy, ‘literate’ versus ‘illiterate’, does not adequately deal with levels of skill that run from zero to Shakespeare and vary from utter confusion in one sphere to easy mastery in another. Illiteracy is, therefore, not a completely foreign concept to any of us.