what is traditional literacy essay

Chapter 1. What is Literacy? Multiple Perspectives on Literacy

Constance Beecher

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” – Frederick Douglass

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Keywords: literacy, digital literacy, critical literacy, community-based literacies

Definitions of literacy from multiple perspectives

Literacy is the cornerstone of education by any definition. Literacy refers to the ability of people to read and write (UNESCO, 2017). Reading and writing in turn are about encoding and decoding information between written symbols and sound (Resnick, 1983; Tyner, 1998). More specifically, literacy is the ability to understand the relationship between sounds and written words such that one may read, say, and understand them (UNESCO, 2004; Vlieghe, 2015). About 67 percent of children nationwide, and more than 80 percent of those from families with low incomes, are not proficient readers by the end of third grade ( The Nation Assessment for Educational Progress; NAEP 2022 ).  Children who are not reading on grade level by third grade are 4 times more likely to drop out of school than their peers who are reading on grade level. A large body of research clearly demonstrates that Americans with fewer years of education have poorer health and shorter lives. In fact, since the 1990s, life expectancy has fallen for people without a high school education. Completing more years of education creates better access to health insurance, medical care, and the resources for living a healthier life (Saha, 2006). Americans with less education face higher rates of illness, higher rates of disability, and shorter life expectancies. In the U.S., 25-year-olds without a high school diploma can expect to die 9 years sooner than college graduates. For example, by 2011, the prevalence of diabetes had reached 15% for adults without a high -school education, compared with 7% for college graduates (Zimmerman et al., 2018).

Thus, literacy is a goal of utmost importance to society. But what does it mean to be literate, or to be able to read? What counts as literacy?

Learning Objectives

• Describe two or more definitions of literacy and the differences between them.
• Define digital and critical literacy.
• Distinguish between digital literacy, critical literacy, and community-based literacies.
• Explain multiple perspectives on literacy.

Here are some definitions to consider:

“Literacy is the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society.” – United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)

“The ability to understand, use, and respond appropriately to written texts.” – National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), citing the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC)

“An individual’s ability to read, write, and speak in English, compute, and solve problems, at levels of proficiency necessary to function on the job, in the family of the individual, and in society.” – Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), Section 203

“The ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society.” – Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), as cited by the American Library Association’s Committee on Literacy

“Using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.” – Kutner, Greenberg, Jin, Boyle, Hsu, & Dunleavy (2007). Literacy in Everyday Life: Results from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NCES 2007-480)

Which one of these above definitions resonates with you? Why?

New literacy practices as meaning-making practices

In the 21 st century, literacy increasingly includes understanding the roles of digital media and technology in literacy. In 1996, the New London Group coined the term “multiliteracies” or “new literacies” to describe a modern view of literacy that reflected multiple communication forms and contexts of cultural and linguistic diversity within a globalized society. They defined multiliteracies as a combination of multiple ways of communicating and making meaning, including such modes as visual, audio, spatial, behavioral, and gestural (New London Group, 1996). Most of the text’s students come across today are digital (like this textbook!). Instead of books and magazines, students are reading blogs and text messages.

For a short video on the importance of digital literacy, watch The New Media Literacies .

The National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE, 2019) makes it clear that our definitions of literacy must continue to evolve and grow ( NCTE definition of digital literacy ).

“Literacy has always been a collection of communicative and sociocultural practices shared among communities. As society and technology change, so does literacy. The world demands that a literate person possess and intentionally apply a wide range of skills, competencies, and dispositions. These literacies are interconnected, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with histories, narratives, life possibilities, and social trajectories of all individuals and groups. Active, successful participants in a global society must be able to:

• participate effectively and critically in a networked world.
• explore and engage critically and thoughtfully across a wide variety of inclusive texts and tools/modalities.
• consume, curate, and create actively across contexts.
• advocate for equitable access to and accessibility of texts, tools, and information.
• build and sustain intentional global and cross-cultural connections and relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and strengthen independent thought.
• promote culturally sustaining communication and recognize the bias and privilege present in the interactions.
• examine the rights, responsibilities, and ethical implications of the use and creation of information.
• determine how and to what extent texts and tools amplify one’s own and others’ narratives as well as counterproductive narratives.
• recognize and honor the multilingual literacy identities and culture experiences individuals bring to learning environments, and provide opportunities to promote, amplify, and encourage these variations of language (e.g., dialect, jargon, and register).”

In other words, literacy is not just the ability to read and write. It is also being able to effectively use digital technology to find and analyze information. Students who are digitally literate know how to do research, find reliable sources, and make judgments about what they read online and in print. Next, we will learn more about digital literacy.

• Malleable : can be changed.
• Culturally sustaining : the pedagogical preservation of the cultural and linguistic competence of young people pertaining to their communities of origin while simultaneously affording dominant-culture competence.
• Bias : a tendency to believe that some people, ideas, etc., are better than others, usually resulting in unfair treatment.
• Privilege : a right or benefit that is given to some people and not to others.
• Unproductive narrative : negative commonly held beliefs such as “all students from low-income backgrounds will struggle in school.” (Narratives are phrases or ideas that are repeated over and over and become “shared narratives.” You can spot them in common expressions and stories that almost everyone knows and holds as ingrained values or beliefs.)

Literacy in the digital age

The Iowa Core recognizes that today, literacy includes technology. The goal for students who graduate from the public education system in Iowa is:

“Each Iowa student will be empowered with the technological knowledge and skills to learn effectively and live productively. This vision, developed by the Iowa Core 21st Century Skills Committee, reflects the fact that Iowans in the 21st century live in a global environment marked by a high use of technology, giving citizens and workers the ability to collaborate and make individual contributions as never before. Iowa’s students live in a media-suffused environment, marked by access to an abundance of information and rapidly changing technological tools useful for critical thinking and problem-solving processes. Therefore, technological literacy supports preparation of students as global citizens capable of self-directed learning in preparation for an ever-changing world” (Iowa Core Standards 21 st Century Skills, n.d.).

NOTE: The essential concepts and skills of technology literacy are taken from the International Society for Technology in Education’s National Educational Technology Standards for Students: Grades K-2 | Technology Literacy Standards

Literacy in any context is defined as the ability “ to access, manage, integrate, evaluate, and create information in order to function in a knowledge society” (ICT Literacy Panel, 2002). “ When we teach only for facts (specifics)… rather than for how to go beyond facts, we teach students how to get out of date ” (Sternberg, 2008). This statement is particularly significant when applied to technology literacy. The Iowa essential concepts for technology literacy reflect broad, universal processes and skills.

Unlike the previous generations, learning in the digital age is marked using rapidly evolving technology, a deluge of information, and a highly networked global community (Dede, 2010). In such a dynamic environment, learners need skills beyond the basic cognitive ability to consume and process language. To understand the characteristics of the digital age, and what this means for how people learn in this new and changing landscape, one may turn to the evolving discussion of literacy or, as one might say now, of digital literacy. The history of literacy contextualizes digital literacy and illustrates changes in literacy over time. By looking at literacy as an evolving historical phenomenon, we can glean the fundamental characteristics of the digital age. These characteristics in turn illuminate the skills needed to take advantage of digital environments. The following discussion is an overview of digital literacy, its essential components, and why it is important for learning in the digital age.

Literacy is often considered a skill or competency. Children and adults alike can spend years developing the appropriate skills for encoding and decoding information. Over the course of thousands of years, literacy has become much more common and widespread, with a global literacy rate ranging from 81% to 90% depending on age and gender (UNESCO, 2016). From a time when literacy was the domain of an elite few, it has grown to include huge swaths of the global population. There are several reasons for this, not the least of which are some of the advantages the written word can provide. Kaestle (1985) tells us that “literacy makes it possible to preserve information as a snapshot in time, allows for recording, tracking and remembering information, and sharing information more easily across distances among others” (p. 16). In short, literacy led “to the replacement of myth by history and the replacement of magic by skepticism and science.”

If literacy involves the skills of reading and writing, digital literacy requires the ability to extend those skills to effectively take advantage of the digital world (American Library Association [ALA], 2013). More general definitions express digital literacy as the ability to read and understand information from digital sources as well as to create information in various digital formats (Bawden, 2008; Gilster, 1997; Tyner, 1998; UNESCO, 2004). Developing digital skills allows digital learners to manage a vast array of rapidly changing information and is key to both learning and working in the evolving digital landscape (Dede, 2010; Koltay, 2011; Mohammadyari & Singh, 2015). As such, it is important for people to develop certain competencies specifically for handling digital content.

ALA Digital Literacy Framework

To fully understand the many digital literacies, we will look at the American Library Association (ALA) framework. The ALA framework is laid out in terms of basic functions with enough specificity to make it easy to understand and remember but broad enough to cover a wide range of skills. The ALA framework includes the following areas:

• understanding,
• evaluating,
• creating, and
• communicating (American Library Association, 2013).

Finding information in a digital environment represents a significant departure from the way human beings have searched for information for centuries. The learner must abandon older linear or sequential approaches to finding information such as reading a book, using a card catalog, index, or table of contents, and instead use more horizontal approaches like natural language searches, hypermedia text, keywords, search engines, online databases and so on (Dede, 2010; Eshet, 2002). The shift involves developing the ability to create meaningful search limits (SCONUL, 2016). Previously, finding the information would have meant simply looking up page numbers based on an index or sorting through a card catalog. Although finding information may depend to some degree on the search tool being used (library, internet search engine, online database, etc.) the search results also depend on how well a person is able to generate appropriate keywords and construct useful Boolean searches. Failure in these two areas could easily return too many results to be helpful, vague, or generic results, or potentially no useful results at all (Hangen, 2015).

Part of the challenge of finding information is the ability to manage the results. Because there is so much data, changing so quickly, in so many different formats, it can be challenging to organize and store them in such a way as to be useful. SCONUL (2016) talks about this as the ability to organize, store, manage, and cite digital resources, while the Educational Testing Service also specifically mentions the skills of accessing and managing information. Some ways to accomplish these tasks is using social bookmarking tools such as Diigo, clipping and organizing software such as Evernote and OneNote, and bibliographic software. Many sites, such as YouTube, allow individuals with an account to bookmark videos, as well as create channels or collections of videos for specific topics or uses. Other websites have similar features.

Understanding

Understanding in the context of digital literacy perhaps most closely resembles traditional literacy because it is the ability to read and interpret text (Jones-Kavalier & Flannigan, 2006). In the digital age, however, the ability to read and understand extends much further than text alone. For example, searches may return results with any combination of text, video, sound, and audio, as well as still and moving pictures. As the internet has evolved, a whole host of visual languages have also evolved, such as moving images, emoticons, icons, data visualizations, videos, and combinations of all the above. Lankshear & Knoble (2008) refer to these modes of communication as “post typographic textual practice.” Understanding the variety of modes of digital material may also be referred to as multimedia literacy (Jones-Kavalier & Flannigan, 2006), visual literacy (Tyner, 1998), or digital literacy (Buckingham, 2006).

Evaluating digital media requires competencies ranging from assessing the importance of a piece of information to determining its accuracy and source. Evaluating information is not new to the digital age, but the nature of digital information can make it more difficult to understand who the source of information is and whether it can be trusted (Jenkins, 2018). When there are abundant and rapidly changing data across heavily populated networks, anyone with access can generate information online. This results in the learner needing to make decisions about its authenticity, trustworthiness, relevance, and significance. Learning evaluative digital skills means learning to ask questions about who is writing the information, why they are writing it, and who the intended audience is (Buckingham, 2006). Developing critical thinking skills is part of the literacy of evaluating and assessing the suitability for use of a specific piece of information (SCONUL, 2016).

Creating in the digital world makes the production of knowledge and ideas in digital formats explicit. While writing is a critical component of traditional literacy, it is not the only creative tool in the digital toolbox. Other tools are available and include creative activities such as podcasting, making audio-visual presentations, building data visualizations, 3D printing, and writing blogs. Tools that haven’t been thought of before are constantly appearing. In short, a digitally literate individual will want to be able to use all formats in which digital information may be conveyed in the creation of a product. A key component of creating with digital tools is understanding what constitutes fair use and what is considered plagiarism. While this is not new to the digital age, it may be more challenging these days to find the line between copying and extending someone else’s work.

In part, the reason for the increased difficulty in discerning between plagiarism and new work is the “cut and paste culture” of the Internet, referred to as “reproduction literacy” (Eshet 2002, p.4), or appropriation in Jenkins’ New Media Literacies (Jenkins, 2018). The question is, what kind and how much change is required to avoid the accusation of plagiarism? This skill requires the ability to think critically, evaluate a work, and make appropriate decisions. There are tools and information to help understand and find those answers, such as the Creative Commons. Learning about such resources and how to use them is part of digital literacy.

Communicating

Communicating is the final category of digital skills in the ALA digital framework. The capacity to connect with individuals all over the world creates unique opportunities for learning and sharing information, for which developing digital communication skills is vital. Some of the skills required for communicating in the digital environment include digital citizenship, collaboration, and cultural awareness. This is not to say that one does not need to develop communication skills outside of the digital environment, but that the skills required for digital communication go beyond what is required in a non-digital environment. Most of us are adept at personal, face- to-face communication, but digital communication needs the ability to engage in asynchronous environments such as email, online forums, blogs, social media, and learning platforms where what is written may not be deleted and may be misinterpreted. Add that to an environment where people number in the millions and the opportunities for misunderstanding and cultural miscues are likely.

The communication category of digital literacies covers an extensive array of skills above and beyond what one might need for face-to-face interactions. It is comprised of competencies around ethical and moral behavior, responsible communication for engagement in social and civic activities (Adam Becker et al., 2017), an awareness of audience, and an ability to evaluate the potential impact of one’s online actions. It also includes skills for handling privacy and security in online environments. These activities fall into two main categories: digital citizenship and collaboration.

Digital citizenship refers to one’s ability to interact effectively in the digital world. Part of this skill is good manners, often referred to as “netiquette.” There is a level of context which is often missing in digital communication due to physical distance, lack of personal familiarity with the people online, and the sheer volume of the people who may encounter our words. People who know us well may understand exactly what we mean when we say something sarcastic or ironic, but people online do not know us, and vocal and facial cues are missing in most digital communication, making it more likely we will be misunderstood. Furthermore, we are more likely to misunderstand or be misunderstood if we are unaware of cultural differences. So, digital citizenship includes an awareness of who we are, what we intend to say, and how it might be perceived by other people we do not know (Buckingham, 2006). It is also a process of learning to communicate clearly in ways that help others understand what we mean.

Another key digital skill is collaboration, and it is essential for effective participation in digital projects via the Internet. The Internet allows people to engage with others they may never see in person and work towards common goals, be they social, civic, or business oriented. Creating a community and working together requires a degree of trust and familiarity that can be difficult to build when there is physical distance between the participants. Greater effort must be made to be inclusive , and to overcome perceived or actual distance and disconnectedness. So, while the potential of digital technology for connecting people is impressive, it is not automatic or effortless, and it requires new skills.

Literacy narratives are stories about reading or composing a message in any form or context. They often include poignant memories that involve a personal experience with literacy. Digital literacy narratives can sometimes be categorized as ones that focus on how the writer came to understand the importance of technology in their life or pedagogy. More often, they are simply narratives that use a medium beyond the print-based essay to tell the story:

Create your own literacy narrative that tells of a significant experience you had with digital literacy. Use a multi-modal tool that includes audio and images or video. Share it with your classmates and discuss the most important ideas you notice in each other’s narratives.

Critical literacy

Literacy scholars recognize that although literacy is a cognitive skill, it is also a set of practices that communities and people participate in. Next, we turn to another perspective on literacy – critical literacy. “Critical” here is not meant as having a negative point of view, but rather using an analytic lens that detects power, privilege, and representation to understand different ways of looking at texts. For example, when groups or individuals stage a protest, do the media refer to them as “protesters” or “rioters?” What is the reason for choosing the label they do, and what are the consequences? 

Critical literacy does not have a set definition or typical history of use, but the following key tenets have been described in the literature, which will vary in their application based on the individual social context (Vasquez, 2019). Table 1 presents some key aspects of critical literacy, but this area of literacy research is growing and evolving rapidly, so this is not an exhaustive list.

An important component of critical literacy is the adoption of culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy. One definition comes from Dr. Django Paris (2012), who stated that Culturally Responsive-Sustaining (CR-S) education recognizes that cultural differences (including racial, ethnic, linguistic, gender, sexuality, and ability ones) should be treated as assets for teaching and learning. Culturally sustaining pedagogy requires teachers to support multilingualism and multiculturalism in their practice. That is, culturally sustaining pedagogy seeks to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, literary, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling.

For more, see the Culturally Responsive and Sustaining F ramework . The framework helps educators to think about how to create student-centered learning environments that uphold racial, linguistic, and cultural identities. It prepares students for rigorous independent learning, develops their abilities to connect across lines of difference, elevates historically marginalized voices, and empowers them as agents of social change. CR-S education explores the relationships between historical and contemporary conditions of inequality and the ideas that shape access, participation, and outcomes for learners.

• What can you do to learn more about your students’ cultures?
• How can you build and sustain relationships with your students?
• How do the instructional materials you use affirm your students’ identities?

Community-based literacies

You may have noticed that communities are a big part of critical literacy – we understand that our environment and culture impact what we read and how we understand the world. Now think about the possible differences among three Iowa communities: a neighborhood in the middle of Des Moines, the rural community of New Hartford, and Coralville, a suburb of Iowa City:

You may not have thought about how living in a certain community might contribute to or take away from a child’s ability to learn to read. Dr. Susan Neuman (2001) did. She and her team investigated the differences between two neighborhoods regarding how much access to books and other reading materials children in those neighborhoods had. One middle-to-upper class neighborhood in Philadelphia had large bookstores, toy stores with educational materials, and well-resourced libraries. The other, a low-income neighborhood, had no bookstores or toy stores. There was a library, but it had fewer resources and served a larger number of patrons. In fact, the team found that even the signs on the businesses were harder to read, and there was less environmental printed word. Their findings showed that each child in the middle-class neighborhood had 13 books on average, while in the lower-class neighborhood there was one book per 300 children .

Dr. Neuman and her team (2019) recently revisited this question. This time, they looked at low-income neighborhoods – those where 60% or more of the people are living in poverty . They compared these to borderline neighborhoods – those with 20-40% in poverty – in three cities, Washington, D.C., Detroit, and Los Angeles. Again, they found significantly fewer books in the very low-income areas. The chart represents the preschool books available for sale in each neighborhood. Note that in the lower-income neighborhood of Washington D.C., there were no books for young children to be found at all!

Now watch this video from Campaign for Grade Level Reading. Access to books is one way that children can have new experiences, but it is not the only way!

What is the “summer slide,” and how does it contribute to the differences in children’s reading abilities?

The importance of being literate and how to get there

“Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope” – Kofi Annan, former United Nations Secretary-General.

Our economy is enhanced when citizens have higher literacy levels. Effective literacy skills open the doors to more educational and employment opportunities so that people can lift themselves out of poverty and chronic underemployment. In our increasingly complex and rapidly changing technological world, it is essential that individuals continuously expand their knowledge and learn new skills to keep up with the pace of change. The goal of our public school system in the United States is to “ensure that all students graduate from high school with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college, career, and life, regardless of where they live.” This is the basis of the Common Core Standards, developed by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center). These groups felt that education was too inconsistent across the different states, and today’s students are preparing to enter a world in which colleges and businesses are demanding more than ever before. To ensure that all students are ready for success after high school, the Common Core State Standards established clear universal guidelines for what every student should know and be able to do in math and English language arts from kindergarten through 12th grade: “The Common Core State Standards do not tell teachers how to teach, but they do help teachers figure out the knowledge and skills their students should have” (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2012).

Explore the Core!

Go to iowacore.gov and click on Literacy Standards. Spend some time looking at the K-3 standards. Notice how consistent they are across the grade levels. Each has specific requirements within the categories:

• Reading Standards for Literature
• Reading Standards for Informational Text
• Reading Standards for Foundational Skills
• Writing Standards
• Speaking and Listening Standards
• Language Standards

Download the Iowa Core K-12 Literacy Manual . You will use it as a reference when you are creating lessons.

Next, explore the Subject Area pages and resources. What tools does the state provide to teachers to support their use of the Core?

Describe a resource you found on the website. How will you use this when you are a teacher?

Watch this video about the Iowa Literacy Core Standards:

• Literacy is typically defined as the ability to ingest, understand, and communicate information.
• Literacy has multiple definitions, each with a different point of focus.
• “New literacies,” or multiliteracies, are a combination of multiple ways of communicating and making meaning, including visual, audio, spatial, behavioral, and gestural communication.
• As online communication has become more prevalent, digital literacy has become more important for learners to engage with the wealth of information available online.
• Critical literacy develops learners’ critical thinking by asking them to use an analytic lens that detects power, privilege, and representation to understand different ways of looking at information.
• The Common Core State Standards were established to set clear, universal guidelines for what every student should know after completing high school.

Resources for teacher educators

• Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework [PDF]
• Common Core State Standards
• Iowa Core Instructional Resources in Literacy

Gonzalez, N., Moll, L. C., & Amanti, C. (Eds.). (2006). Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practices in households, communities, and classrooms . New York, NY: Routledge.

Lau, S. M. C. (2012). Reconceptualizing critical literacy teaching in ESL classrooms. The Reading Teacher, 65 , 325–329.

Literacy. (2018, March 19). Retrieved March 2, 2020, from  https://en.unesco.org/themes/literacy

Neuman, S. B., & Celano, D. (2001). Access to print in low‐income and middle‐income communities: An ecological study of four neighborhoods. Reading Research Quarterly, 36 (1), 8-26.

Neuman, S. B., & Moland, N. (2019). Book deserts: The consequences of income segregation on children’s access to print.  Urban education, 54 (1), 126-147.

New London Group (1996). A Pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures.  Harvard Educational Review, 66 (1), 60-92.

O’Brien, J. (2001). Children reading critically: A local history. In B. Comber & A. Simpson (Eds.), Negotiating critical literacies in classrooms (pp. 41–60). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Ordoñez-Jasis, R., & Ortiz, R. W. (2006). Reading their worlds: Working with diverse families to enhance children’s early literacy development. Y C Young Children, 61 (1), 42.

Saha S. (2006). Improving literacy as a means to reducing health disparities. J Gen Intern Med. 21 (8):893-895. doi:10.1111/j.1525-1497.2006.00546.x

UNESCO. (2017). Literacy rates continue to rise from one generation to the next global literacy trends today. Retrieved from http://on.unesco.org/literacy-map.

Vasquez, V.M., Janks, H. & Comber, B. (2019). Critical Literacy as a Way of Being and Doing. Language Arts, 96 (5), 300-311.

Vlieghe, J. (2015). Traditional and digital literacy. The literacy hypothesis, technologies of reading and writing, and the ‘grammatized’ body. Ethics and Education, 10 (2), 209-226.

Zimmerman, E. B., Woolf, S. H., Blackburn, S. M., Kimmel, A. D., Barnes, A. J., & Bono, R. S. (2018). The case for considering education and health. Urban Education, 53 (6), 744-773.U.S. Department of Education. Institute of Education Sciences.

U.S. Department of Education. Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 2022 Reading Assessment.

Methods of Teaching Early Literacy Copyright © 2023 by Constance Beecher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

What you need to know about literacy

What is the global situation in relation to literacy.

Great progress has been made in literacy with most recent data (UNESCO Institute for Statistics) showing that more than 86 per cent of the world’s population know how to read and write compared to 68 per cent in 1979. Despite this, worldwide at least 765 million adults still cannot read and write, two thirds of them women, and 250 million children are failing to acquire basic literacy skills. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused the worst disruption to education in a century, 617 million children and teenagers had not reached minimum reading levels.   

How does UNESCO define literacy?

Acquiring literacy is not a one-off act. Beyond its conventional concept as a set of reading, writing and counting skills, literacy is now understood as a means of identification, understanding, interpretation, creation, and communication in an increasingly digital, text-mediated, information-rich and fast-changing world. Literacy is a continuum of learning and proficiency in reading, writing and using numbers throughout life and is part of a larger set of skills, which include digital skills, media literacy, education for sustainable development and global citizenship as well as job-specific skills. Literacy skills themselves are expanding and evolving as people engage more and more with information and learning through digital technology.  

What are the effects of literacy?

Literacy empowers and liberates people. Beyond its importance as part of the right to education, literacy improves lives by expanding capabilities which in turn reduces poverty, increases participation in the labour market and has positive effects on health and sustainable development. Women empowered by literacy have a positive ripple effect on all aspects of development. They have greater life choices for themselves and an immediate impact on the health and education of their families, and in particular, the education of girl children.  

How does UNESCO work to promote literacy?

UNESCO works through its global network, field offices and institutes and with its Member States and partners to advance literacy in the framework of lifelong learning, and address the literacy target 4.6 in SDG4 and the Education 2030 Framework for Action . Its Strategy for Youth and Adult Literacy (2020-2025) pays special attention to the member countries of the Global Alliance for Literacy which targets 20 countries with an adult literacy rate below 50 per cent and the E9 countries, of which 17 are in Africa. The focus is on promoting literacy in formal and non-formal settings with four priority areas: strengthening national strategies and policy development on literacy; addressing the needs of disadvantaged groups, particularly women and girls; using digital technologies to expand and improve learning outcomes; and monitoring progress and assessing literacy skills. UNESCO also promotes adult learning and education through its Institute for Lifelong Learning , including the implementation of the 2015 Recommendation on Adult Learning and Education and its monitoring through the Global Report on Adult Learning and Education. 

What is digital literacy and why is it important?

UNESCO defines digital literacy as the ability to access, manage, understand, integrate, communicate, evaluate and create information safely and appropriately through digital technologies for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship. It includes skills such as computer literacy, ICT literacy, information literacy and media literacy which aim to empower people, and in particular youth, to adopt a critical mindset when engaging with information and digital technologies, and to build their resilience in the face of disinformation, hate speech and violent extremism.

How is UNESCO helping advance girls' and women's literacy?

UNESCO’s Global Partnership for Women and Girls Education, launched in 2011, emphasizes quality education for girls and women at the secondary level and in the area of literacy; its Literacy Initiative for Empowerment (LIFE) project (2005–15) targeted women; and UNESCO’s international literacy prizes regularly highlight the life-changing power of meeting women’s and girls’ needs for literacy in specific contexts. Literacy acquisition often brings with it positive change in relation to harmful traditional practices, forms of marginalization and deprivation. Girls’ and women’s literacy seen as lifelong learning is integral to achieving the aims of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.  

How has youth and adult literacy been impacted in times of COVID-19?

Since the start of the pandemic, several surveys have been conducted but very little is still known about the effect on youth and adult literacy of massive disruptions to learning, growing inequalities and projected increases in school dropouts. To fill this gap UNESCO will conduct a global survey “Learning from the COVID-19 crisis to write the future: National policies and programmes for youth and adult literacy” collecting information from countries worldwide regarding the situation and policy and programme responses. Its results will help UNESCO, countries and other partners respond better to the recovery phase and advance progress towards achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4 on education and its target 4.6 on youth and adult literacy. In addition, for International Literacy Day 2020, UNESCO prepared a background paper on the impact of the crisis on youth and adult literacy.

What is the purpose of the Literacy Prize and Literacy Day?

Every year since 1967, UNESCO celebrates International Literacy Day and rewards outstanding and innovative programmes that promote literacy through the International Literacy Prizes. Every year on 8 September UNESCO comes together for the annual celebration with Field Offices, institutes, NGOs, teachers, learners and partners to remind the world of the importance of literacy as a matter of dignity and human rights. The event emphasizes the power of literacy and creates awareness to advance the global agenda towards a more literate and sustainable society. 

The International Literacy Prizes reward excellence and innovation in the field of literacy and, so far, over 506 projects and programmes undertaken by governments, non-governmental organizations and individuals around the world have been recognized. Following an annual call for submissions, an International Jury of experts appointed by UNESCO's Director-General recommends potential prizewinning programmes. Candidates are submitted by Member States or by international non-governmental organizations in official partnership with UNESCO.

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• Lifelong education

The Importance of Literacy Essay (Critical Writing)

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How Can Literacy Affect One’s Life? Essay Introduction

How can literacy affect one’s life essay main body, the importance of literacy: essay conclusion, works cited.

Literacy is a skill that is never late to acquire because it is essential for education, employment, belonging to the community, and ability to help one’s children. Those people, who cannot read, are deprived of many opportunities for professional or personal growth. Unwillingness to become literate can be partly explained by lack of resources and sometimes shame; yet, these obstacles can and should be overcome.

First, one can say that literacy is crucial for every person who wants to understand the life of a society. It is also essential for ability to critically evaluate the world and other people. In his book, Frederick Douglass describes his experiences of learning to read. Being a slave, he had very few opportunities for education.

Moreover, planters were unwilling to teach their slaves any reading skills because they believed that literacy would lead to free thinking and slaves’ aspirations for freedom (Douglass, 96). Overall, they were quite right in their assumption because literacy gives people access to information, and they understand that they can achieve much more than they have. This can be one of the reasons for learning to read.

Yet, literary is essential for many other areas of life, for example, employment. Statistical data show that low-literate adults remain unemployed for approximately six months of the year (Fisher, 211). This problem becomes particularly serious during the time when economy is in the state of recession. It is particularly difficult for such people to retain their jobs especially when businesses try to cut their expenses on workforce.

One should take into account that modern companies try to adapt new technologies or tools, and the task of a worker is to adjust to these changes. Thus, literacy and language proficiency are important for remaining competitive. Furthermore, many companies try to provide training programs to their employees, but participation in such programs is hardly possible with basic reading skills. Thus, these skills enable a person to take advantage of many opportunities.

Additionally, one has to remember that without literacy skills people cannot help their children who may struggle with their homework assignments. Moreover, ability to read enables a person to be a part of the community in which he or she lives. In his essay The Human Cost of an Illiterate Society , Jonathan Kozol eloquently describes the helplessness of illiterate people.

This helplessness manifests itself in a variety of ways; for example, one can mention inability to read medicine prescriptions, contracts, ballot papers, official documents, and so forth (Kozol, unpaged). While speaking about these people, Jonathan Kozol uses the expression “an uninsured existence” which means that they are unaware of their rights, and others can easily exploit them (Kozol, unpaged). To a great extent, illiterate individuals can just be treated as second-class citizens.

This is a danger that people should be aware of. To be an active member of a community, one has to have access to a variety of informational resources, especially, books, official documents, newspapers, printed announcements, and so forth. For illiterate people, these sources are inaccessible, and as a result, they do not know much about the life of a village, town, city, or even a country in which they live.

In some cases, adults are unwilling to acquire literacy skills, because they believe that it is too late for them to do it. Again, one has to remember that there should always be time for learning, especially learning to read.

Secondly, sometimes people are simply ashamed of acknowledging that they cannot read. In their opinion, such an acknowledgment will result in their stigmatization. Yet, by acting in such a way, they only further marginalize themselves. Sooner or later they will admit that ability to read is important for them, and it is better to do it sooner.

Apart from that, people should remember that there are many education programs throughout the country that are specifically intended for people with low literacy skills (Fisher, 214). Certainly, such programs can and should be improved, but they still remain a chance that illiterate adults should not miss. If these people decide to seek help with this problem, they will be assisted by professional educators who will teach them the reading skills that are considered to be mandatory for an adult person.

Although it may seem a far-fetched argument, participation in such programs can open the way to further education. As it has been said by Frederick Douglass learning can be very absorbing and learning to read is only the first step that a person may take (Douglass, 96). This is another consideration that one should not overlook.

Overall, these examples demonstrate that ability to read can open up many opportunities for adults. Employment, education, and ability to uphold one’s rights are probably the main reasons why people should learn to read. Nonetheless, one should not forget that professional growth and self-development can also be very strong stimuli for acquiring or improving literacy skills. Therefore, people with poor literacy skills should actively seek help in order to have a more fulfilling life.

Douglass, Frederick. “Learning to Read.” Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.

Frederick Douglass. New York: Kessinger Publishing, 2004. Print.

Fisher, Nancy. “Literacy Education and the Workforce: bridging the gap.” Journal of Jewish Communal Service 82. 3 (2007): 210-215. Print.

Kozol, Jonathan. The Human Cost of an Illiterate Society. Vanderbilt Students of Nonviolence, 2008. Web.

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Traditional and digital literacy. The literacy hypothesis, technologies of reading and writing, and the ‘grammatized’ body

• Ethics and Education 10(2):1-18

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Minds of Their Own: Traditional and New Literacy in Students and Schools

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Abstract The home–school mismatch hypothesis has played an important part in sociocultural studies of literacy and schooling since the 1970s. In this paper, we explore how this now classic literacy thesis has developed a new life in studies of digital media and electronic communications with regards to young people and schools, what we call the new home–school mismatch hypothesis or new literacy thesis. We report on two studies, one conducted in Australia and the other in Greece, that worked with 14–16-year-old young people to explore the relationships between their use of digital media in- and out-of-school. Our analysis suggests that the relationship between literacy and digital media use in and outside of school is more complex than is often presented in media commentary and in research and points to the need for more careful consideration of the relationship between school and out-of-school practice and knowledge.

Ryan M Rish

This was an essay Joshua Caton and I were invited to write for the Ohio Resource Center's magazine Adolescent Literacies in Perspective. In brief, we make an argument based on our teaching experiences for shifting our focus to the social/literacy practices within which technology use is embedded rather than focusing on the transformative affordances of the technology itself. Though this is not a new argument, it is one Josh and I feel we don't read/hear enough in discussions with English teachers about new literacies, digital literacies, and/or 21st century literacies.

The SAGE Handbook of Early Childhood Literacy

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In this chapter we discuss the impact of digital technologies on notions of literacy and critically explore literacy as normally understood by school curricula (as developing reading, writing and spelling) in relation to ‘new literacies’ (relating to the production and reception of digital and multimodal artefacts and representations as social and situated practices). The chapter also explores related cultural practices of learners in everyday life and explores their relationship to school-based learning.

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Writing with artificial intelligence, literacy – new tools, new thoughts: the progress of expression.

• © 2023 by Joseph M. Moxley - Professor of English - USF

Historically, literacy refers to the act of reading and writing--the act of symbolic thinking. Yet, over time, as humanity has developed new tools for expression (e.g., the printing press, the internet, social media, or artificial intelligence), humanity has developed a more nuanced understanding of what it means to read and write. This article defines literacy, summarizes different types of literacies, and explores the effects of literacy on human consciousness and culture.

Table of Contents

Literacy Definition

Literacy refers to, or functions as,

• the ability to  read  and  write  in home, school, workplace, and public settings
• an amalgam of competencies, skills, knowledge, and dispositions related to acts of interpretation , communication , or competency
• a commodity
• empowers people to develop their personal, social, and economic power
• empowers literate cultures to develop new ideas and methods, including science, social science, humanities, engineering, and arts
• a measure of educational attainment and audience awareness .

Related Concepts

Academic Writing Prose Style ; Critical Literacy ; Information Literacy ; Intellectual Openness ; Professional Writing Prose Style ; Rhetoric & Apparatus Theory ; Semiotics: Sign, Signifier, Signified ; Writing Process

What is Literacy? – Guide to Literacy

Definitions of literacy are constantly changing as cultures and technologies evolve–and as our understanding of reading and writing becomes more nuanced. Throughout much of human history, literacy referred simply to a person’s ability to read and write alphabetical texts . Around 3400 BC in Sumer (in modern day Iraq) you were literate if you could write in Sumerian on a clay tablet to record agricultural matters and business contracts. In the Middle Ages you were considered literate if you could sign your name with an X to symbolize “In Christ’s name, it’s true/I assert.” Later on, you were considered literate if you could read a bus schedule or a daily newspaper.

In more recent times, literacy has come to refer to

• any act of symbolic thinking (e.g., visual language , nonverbal language, or musical language) to communicate
• any competency. For instance, someone with sports knowledge could be said to have sports literacy. Or someone with knowledge of medical discourse might be described as scientifically literate.

In some  discourse communities  in 2023, you wouldn’t be considered  literate  if you couldn’t write computer code, create  data visualizations , publish a podcast, or design an iPhone app. In  workplace writing , as  communication  has become more  visual  and interactive, basic literacy may be defined as  knowledge  of the  principles of design  or  universal design  or even  page design and scannability . In settings such as college-level courses, basic literacy may refer to the ability to manipulate photos, subscribe to and publish podcasts, data walk content across digital platforms, and publish content online via various digital tools, such as WordPress, Wiki, Instagram, or Tik Tok.

Thanks to advances in human knowledge , new writing spaces (e.g., clay or stone tablets, papyrus, paper, email, text messages, social media) are constantly evolving–and challenging existing assumptions about the best ways to read and write. These writing spaces along with new writing tools (e.g., fingers, quills, pencils, pens, keyboards, stylus, mouse, ChatGPT) have affordances and constraints that profoundly influence whether they replace existing technologies or whether they create new means of creative expression. When writing spaces and writing tools — the apparatus of writing — make a composing process easier, those tools are likely to be widely adopted. Note, for instance, how the internet’s affordance of permitting a single individual to communicate to a massive global audience has transformed authorship, copyright , politics, economics, culture, and intellectual property standards .

New writing spaces and writing tool s are constantly redefining

• their research methodologies along with the epistemological assumptions about what constitutes a valid knowledge claim
• the medium of expression (e.g., alphabetical language; visual language ; nonverbal language)
• their composing process (aka creative process) .

1. Literacy Refers to the Ability To Read and Write

Traditionally, the term literacy refers to humanity’s unique capability to read and write –and to engage in acts of symbolic thought. Between 16 and 24 months children are capable of associating words and symbols with concrete objects . For instance, when reading a children’s book, children may point to a familiar object such as a picture of a dog and say “dog” (“Symbolic Thought” 2012).

As humanity has developed new tools for expression (e.g., the print press, the internet, social media, AI – Artificial Intelligence), we have also developed more nuanced ways of defining literacy–new ways of conceptualizing reading and writing

Semiotics , an interdisciplinary academic field that investigates how people convey meaning to one another, conceptualizes reading to be an act of signification . In this model, meaning is composed of (1)  a signifier –i.e., a word or symbol or something that conveys meaning to others — and (2) a signified –i.e., the underlying meaning associated with a sign . In other words, meaning is — a sign -which is any word , symbol , visualization or thing that can be interpreted to mean something.

In this definition of literacy, meaning-making is a social process: To communicate , writers and readers use signs that are socially shared among members of a discourse community . For communication to be successful, thus, the reader and the writer must share an understanding of what the Semiotics: Sign, Signifier, Signified means. In other words, writers and readers constitute a discourse community , a shared interpretative network . People are inculcated into the discourse practices of a community by reading, by communicating wit h others in the discourse community and through schooling–enculturation: Informally, they read the works of other community members, the archive , and learn over time who quotes whom–what the canon is.

During school, students are introduced to the expectations of discourse communities , particularly as they learn about the discourse practices of the academic and workplace writers . For instance, in the U.S. students learn the conventions of Standard Written English , including formal instruction in grammar , mechanics , and style –especially The Elements of Style . In higher education coursework, students enrolled in first-year writing courses across colleges and universities are trained to adopt an academic writing prose style . They are introduced to academic genres (e.g., an annotated bibliography or an argument ), information literacy perspectives & practices , and citation practices . From reading, talks with others in a discourse community , and from their own experiences receiving critiques from others, they learn to share expectations about common patterns for genre , diction , grammar , mechanics , sentence structure , media –and more. In turn, students enrolled in workplace writing courses are introduced to the shared expectations of a professional writing prose style for business contexts. Broadly speaking, all of these discourse conventions constitute signs than can be interpreted by members of a discourse community .

2. Literacy Refers to a Synthesis of Cognitive, Interpersonal, and Intrapersonal Competencies

Literacy, as defined by the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) community is an amalgam of many competencies, skills, knowledge, and dispositions. In  Education for Life  and Work  (2012), The National Research Council theorizes that all of the competencies involved in acts of communication coalesce under three foundational knowledge domains:

• Cognitive Competencies
• Intrapersonal Competencies
• Interpersonal Competencies

Notice in their depiction of these knowledge domains below that the National Research Council places communication , reasoning, and problem solving at the center of their conceptual illustration. In other words, the STEM community defines literacy as literacy a complex, symbolic process that is dependent on numerous interdependent competencies.

3. Literacy Refers to a Commodity

Literacy functions as a commodity : the ability to read and write , to engage in symbolic thinking, may be exchanged for money, goods, services, opportunities, and jobs. Mastery of specialized literacies — such as digital literacy, visual literacy , design literacy , financial literacy, health literacy — can be particularly profitable.

Moreover, ideas, concepts, inventions, original stories are all forms of intellectual property that are protected by copyright . Information has value .

Each year, NACE (The National Association of Colleges and Employers) surveys employers regarding their hiring plans and desires. Year after year, communication and critical thinking are the most highly sought after competencies. In 2022, for instance, 98.5% of the employers surveyed believed communication competencies were needed for career readiness, yet employers believed only 54.3% of college graduates were suitably prepared to communicate well in the workplace.

4. Literacy Refers to a Technology, a Toolset

In writing studies (and the broader education community) literacy is perceived to

• empower people to develop their personal, social, and economic power
• empower literate cultures to develop new ideas and research methods, including science, social science, humanities, engineering, and arts–and more.

Literacy Empowers People to Develop their Personal, Social, and Economic Power

Personal power.

Literacy provides agency. Strong communication skills will enable you to fight for changes you deem important and help you develop your goals and personal mission. Writing (and communication in general) enables you to articulate the need for change and action. Informing, persuading, and entertaining other people about your thoughts and insights enables you to provoke changes you deem important.

Literacy facilitates your personal development in meaningful ways. Engaging in writing about your goals can help you determine 

• develop your cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal competencies
• develop awareness of others–different cultures, historical periods–and more
• affirm a growth mindset , take authority and ownership of your life
• think independently and be an agent for change
• make the world a better place.

When you write something down on a page, you are no longer as slave to memory. Literacy empowers reflection, self regulation , and metacognition . By transforming your thoughts into text , you create an opportunity to return to that thought and reflect on it. This affordance of writing to help you record a thought for later reflection frees you from the tyranny of a moment-by-moment existence.

Writing from our hearts, sharing our experiences, can be important to our personal happiness. You can keep a journal to reflect on your writing processes , obstacles, and ambitions. When you read the work of other people who have different values, experiences, religions, and world views, your own knowledge and perspective may evolve. While conducting research for writing, you are likely to come across ideas, places, and concepts that you otherwise might not consider. While collaborating on documents, you may obtain insights from your co-authors regarding your strengths and weakness as a researcher, writer, and collaborator.

Social Power – Cultural Power

From a personal-social perspective, writing enables individuals to forge connections with family and friends as well as people we may not otherwise meet in face-to-face situations. Via handwritten notes to posts on social media, writing affords the possibility of connecting with friends and sharing insights and aspirations. Our writing can create rich social networks that give us a sense of meaning and connectedness.

From a nation-state perspective, literacy is an important measure of a country’s competitiveness, and a signal of the health of its people and the quality of its educational systems. Not surprisingly, nations are eager to measure literacy within their borders and across nation states.

• PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) is a worldwide assessment of the mathematical, science, and reading competencies of 15 year olds conducted by the  Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development  (OECD). In 2018, the last time PISA was conducted, the United States ranked 13th out of 79 countries and regions. The top 10 countries were China (B-S-J-Z), Singapore, Macao (China), Estonia, Canada, Finland, Ireland, Korea, Sweden, and New Zealand).

According to a subsequent NAEP report card, the decline in U.S. students’ literacy skills in 2019 accelerated in 2022: Remarkably, only thirty-three percent of fourth grade students scored at or above the NAEP proficiency level. Across the board literacy rates fell at the 4th and 8th level (12 grade assessments have yet to be reported): “the average reading score at both fourth and eighth grade decreased by 3 points compared to 2019. At fourth grade, the average reading score was lower than all previous assessment years going back to 2005 and was not significantly different in comparison to 1992.” This is especially problematic because children who cannot read in the 4th grade are 15 times more likely to drop out of school (NAEP Report Card: Reading 2019). At the adult level, there is further evidence of declining literacy competencies in the U.S.: “ According to a 2021 Pew Research survey , roughly a quarter of American adults—including 38 percent of Hispanic adults, 25 percent of Black adults and 20 percent of white adults—say they haven’t read a book in whole or in part in the past year, whether in print or in electronic or audio form. This is even true of 11 percent of adults with a bachelor’s or other advanced degree. These  figures  are nearly triple those reported in 1978″ (Mintz 2022).

From a social perspective, declines in literacy weaken the social fabric of a culture, creating fragmentation and discord. Without a shared archive , canon , people lack shared religious, political, and historical allusions.

Economic Power

Literacy is strongly correlated with economic power: “In an information  economy ,  reading  and writing serve as input, output, and conduit for producing profit and winning  economic  advantage (Deborah Brandt, D. 2001).

Literacy empower literate cultures to develop new ideas and methods–and more.

In writing studies and media studies, literacy is perceived to be a technology that transforms consciousness and cultures. For instance, in Orality and literacy : the technologizing of the word , Walter Ong theorizes that literacy empowers cultures to break away from the discourse patterns of orality. Ong argues literacy creates the possibility of sustained inquiry and science; it offers a method for interpreting texts ( hermeneutics ), creates the need for schooling, and places the spotlight on knowledge as opposed to pathos , which underscores oral discourse. He argues oral cultures tend to repeat the same things over and over again–that the focus is on memory and repetition as opposed to making new knowledge or testing knowledge claims :

Following Ong’s analysis of ways literacy transforms human consciousness and following the emergence of the internet and new media, Gregory Ulmer has theorized that we have entered an Age of Electracy. For Ulmer, electracy functions as a form of entertainment that is experienced subjectively. (See Rhetoric & Apparatus Theory for more on this.)

5. Literacy Refers to a Measure of Educational Attainment and Audience Awareness.

Ultimately, as you have no doubt surmised from the above discussion, literacy functions as a signal of how educated someone is with regards to a discourse community’s conventions and expectations . If you cannot adjust the register of your communications and use the diction, syntax, genres, and media your audiences expects, then you’ll be judged as uneducated or unprofessional.

Types of Literacy

Because the term literacy has been broadened to reference competency in any topic , there are literally hundreds of different types of literacies. Below are a few of the main ones, the ones that matter in academic and workplace contexts .

Functional Literacy

At the international level, as discussed above, world governments focus on functional definitions of literacy–i.e., how well citizens can understand words and sentences and how well they can interpret, make inferences from, and act on what they read across multiple texts. For instance, can citizens understand a newspaper? Can they understand an airplane or bus schedule? Can they read the job announcement and submit a job application?

Critical Literacy

In educational contexts, critical literacy , rather than functional literacy , is the goal. Critical literacy is concerned with rhetorical analysis of power relationships. Critical literacy engages students in metacognition and self reflection about the currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, and purpose of knowledge claims .

Digital Literacy

Digital literacy concerns how individuals navigate and employ digital tools to consume and produce information.

New communication technologies (e.g., the pen, pencil, printing press, internet) alter how people think and conduct themselves–how they collaborate, design , edit , invent , organize , research , and revise documents. As communication technologies evolve, digital literacies create new genres and new media .

Information Literacy

Information Literacy   refers to the  competencies  associated with  locating ,  evaluating ,  using , and archiving   information . In order to thrive, much less survive in  a global information economy  — an economy where  information  functions as a capital good such as money or social influence — you need to be strategic about how you  consume  and use  information .

• ACRL Information Literacy Perspectives & Practices
• Authority (in Speech and Writing)
• Empathetic Information Literacy
• Information Architecture
• Information Design
• Information, Data
• Interpretation, Interpretative Frameworks
• The CRAAP Test

Quantitative Literacy

Quantitative Literacy refers to the ability to understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute numerical information.

Visual Literacy

“Visual literacy is a set of abilities that enables an individual to effectively find, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media. Visual literacy skills equip a learner to understand and analyze the contextual, cultural, ethical, aesthetic, intellectual, and technical components involved in the production and use of visual materials. A visually literate individual is both a critical consumer of visual media and a competent contributor to a body of shared knowledge and culture. .In an interdisciplinary, higher education environment, a visually literate individual is able to Determine the nature and extent of the visual materials needed Find and access needed images and visual media effectively and efficiently Interpret and analyze the meaning of images and visual media Critically evaluate images and their sources Use images and visual media effectively Design and create meaningful images and visual media Understand many of the ethical, legal, social, and economic issues surrounding the creation and use of images and visual media, and access and use visual materials ethically.” ACRL (Association of College & Research Libraries

• ( ACRL Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education ).

What is Literacy?

Literacy — What it means to be literate or to engage in literacy practices — is never a question that can be answered definitively. Why? Because what it means to be literate is constantly changing, evolving. Years ago, if you could correctly interpret a bus map and get to work, you’d be considered literate . In today’s world, you’re not literate — by some community standards — — if you cannot read and write computer code.

Why Does Literacy Matter?

Literacy–broadly conceived of as reading and writing–is empowering, both professionally and personally. Engaging in literacy practices further develops your cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal competencies . Literacy provides a culture, a community , with the capacity to design an archive ; to engage in dialog, textual hermeneutics , and research ; and to track citations and contributions to human knowledge .

Recommended Resources

Ong. (1988). Orality and literacy : the technologizing of the word. Routledge.

“ACRL Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education”, American Library Association, October 27, 2011. http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/visualliteracy (Accessed February 11, 2023). Document ID: 4d02961f-23ff-b874-7d6d-9f8d0b87e7c2

Brandt, D. (Ed.). (2001). Literacy, Opportunity, and Economic Change. In Literacy in American Lives (pp. 25–46). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511810237.002

National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) . (n.d.). Retrieved February 8, 2023, from https://nces.ed.gov/naal/fr_definition.asp#:~:text=Literacy%20is%20the%20ability%20to,develop%20one’s%20knowledge%20and%20potential.

National Research Council. (2012).  Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century . J.W. Pellegrino and M.L. Hilton (Eds.), Committee on Defining Deeper Learning and 21st Century Skills, Center for Education, Board on Testing and Assessment, Division of Behavioral Sciences

NAEP Reading: Reading Highlights 2022 . (2022, November). NAEP Report Card: 2022 NAEP Reading Assessment. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/reading/2022/

UNESCO. (2006)  Education for All: A Global Monitoring Report . Chapter 6: “Understandings of Literacy.” p. 147-159,   http://www.unesco.org/education/GMR2006/full/chapt6_eng.pdf

White, S., and McCloskey, M. (2003).  Framework for the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy  (NCES 2005-531). U.S. Department of Education. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics.  https://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/fr_skills.asp

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Cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal competencies, according to learning scientists, form the foundation of communication and thought. Learn about these highly prized, workforce-competencies.

Communication refers to the sender’s use of signs and semiotic systems (e.g., body language, alphabetical or visual language) to convey meaning and (2) the reader’s, listener’s, user’s . . ....

Read critically. Conduct a rhetorical analysis and CRAAP Test to evaluate the veracity of information and to glean insights into about information design.

• Alexandra W. Watkins

Semiotics is a theory of communication.Review scholarship on how humans use and interpret signs to communicate, learn, and to develop new knowledge,

Writing refers to the act of using a writing instrument (e.g., a pen, a keyboard, or iPhone) to compose a message to an audience using a symbolic system, typically alphabetical language.

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Literacy is More than Just Reading and Writing

NCTE 03.23.20 Diversity

From the NCTE Standing Committee on Global Citizenship

This post was written by NCTE member Amber Peterson, a member of the NCTE Standing Committee on Global Citizenship.

“History is written by the victors.” —Unknown

As committee members, we regularly wrestle with pinning down a comprehensive definition of literacy. The common definition, “the ability to read and write,” gets increasingly complex upon closer examination. What does mastery of reading and writing look like? How do we measure it? How do we weigh digital and technological proficiency? Where does numeracy come in? How do the values of our communities and cultural practices come into play? sWhen measuring literacy, which languages and dialects count and which do not?

Despite the complexity, literacy is the global metric we use to assess the health and competence of communities. High literacy rates have been found to correlate to everything from better access to economic opportunity, to better nutrition, to environmental sustainability.

In fact, bolstering global literacy underpins all of UNESCO’s 2030 Sustainability Goals, acknowledging the fact that ideals like gender equality, sustainable infrastructure, and eradicating poverty and hunger are not possible without literate populations. Correspondingly, UNESCO’s hefty definition of literacy is “a means of identification, understanding, interpretation, creation, and communication in an increasingly digital, text-mediated, information-rich and fast-changing world.” (UNESCO)

This focus on literacy as a tool for meaningful engagement with society makes sense. As our population expands and technology breaks down ever more barriers between us, the ability to communicate and interact with those around us becomes even more important. In our consideration of literacy, however, it is impossible to ignore the myriad ways that imperialist and colonialist systems shape gender and regional disparities in access.

Many historians propose that written language emerged at least in part as a tool for maintaining power. One’s class status dictated one’s access to literacy education, and often those without power were prohibited from learning to read and write at all. Colonialism, imperialism, and the sprawl of anglo-european, male-centered ideology from the 15th Century onward have created global power structures that still dominate today.

When considered from that perspective, it is no surprise that women make up two thirds of the world’s illiterate population, and that sub-Saharan Africa, the region arguably hit hardest by many of those inequitable power structures, has some of the lowest literacy levels in the world.

While our focus must and should be on providing everyone everywhere with the tools to “identify, understand, interpret, create, and communicate in an increasingly digital, text-mediated, information-rich, and fast changing world,” those persistent inequitable power structures dictate that progress will always be lopsided and slow.

As we slog onward, perhaps we also need to examine and consider more closely the world and experience of the “illiterate” as well. Only relatively recently has literacy been expected or even possible for the vast majority of society. For centuries, people have lived, laughed, traded, communicated, and survived without being able to read and write. Even today, though illiteracy can be a literal death sentence (studies have shown that female literacy rates can actually be a predictor of child mortality rates (Saurabh et al)), it is most certainly a metaphorical one wherein the experiences had and contributions made by those so afflicted are devalued both by design and by conceit.

We doom entire cultures and erase the experiences of entire populations by embracing the superiority of those who are literate, but illiteracy doesn’t mean ignorance. We can and should learn from everyone and we must provide other avenues to global citizenship for those who can’t read and write.

So what does this mean for our definition of literacy? At its simplest, literacy is the way that we interact with the world around us, how we shape it and are shaped by it. It is how we communicate with others via reading and writing, but also by speaking, listening, and creating. It is how we articulate our experience in the world and declare, “We Are Here!”

In my work as the director of program innovation for LitWorld, I get to interact with young people all over the world and examine the idea of literacy from many different angles. Resources for literacy education differ dramatically from one place to another, as do metric taking procedures and general best practices.

What does not change is the inherent drive for people to express themselves, to learn, and to grow. I see the enthusiasm with which young people jump at the chance to share stories of themselves and of the world, to be listened to and to absorb. I also see firsthand the devastating effect of being told that your story, your community, and your culture do not matter. I have witnessed the loss of confidence, the dwindling self-esteem, and the cycle of hopelessness that comes with the silencing of voices.

It is our charge as educators and as global citizens to embrace literacy in ALL of its forms.

5 Suggestions for Embracing Literacy for Global Citizenship in the Classroom

• Focus on students’ own stories . Find ways to center their experiences and lean in to opportunities to share them both informally and formally.
• Embrace ALL of the languages your students speak. Being multilingual is an asset, not a deficit! Many of our students are multilingual in ways we never acknowledge. Mastery of formal and standardized language structures is an important tool that every student deserves access to, but life often happens outside of and around those structures. Those everyday interactions are important, valuable, and valid as well.
• Provide regular access to diverse stories, images, experiences, and perspectives. The world is enormous and that diversity is beautiful. Help your students to see it as such. Providing access to underrepresented narratives and accounts helps to decolonize your classroom and normalize embracing the unfamiliar.
• Place value on reading, writing, speaking, listening, and creating in your students’ work. Ensure that reading and writing are not the only ways in which students are acknowledged and celebrated for taking in ideas, expressing their thoughts, or demonstrating understanding. Encouraging multiple modes of expression not only provides more opportunities for students to explore and display their own intelligence, it also primes them to seek information, inspiration, and knowledge from diverse sources.
• Read aloud together, and often . Reading aloud is effective across grade levels, despite the fact that this critical practice usually stops in elementary school. Reading aloud can provide access to content that students might not be able to access on their own. It is also a way of creating community and building a shared experience as a whole class.

The Standing Committee on Global Citizenship works to identify and address issues of broad concern to NCTE members interested in promoting global citizenship and connections across global contexts within the Council and within members’ teaching contexts.

Literacy. (2018, March 19). Retrieved March 2, 2020, from https://en.unesco.org/themes/literacy

Saurabh, S., Sarkar, S., & Pandey, D. K. (2013). Female Literacy Rate is a Better Predictor of Birth Rate and Infant Mortality Rate in India. Retrieved March 2, 2020, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4649870/

The Sustainable Development Agenda—United Nations Sustainable Development. (n.d.). Retrieved March 2, 2020, from https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/development-agenda/

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Literacy is experience, competency, and skill in communication. Literacy begins with language acquisition; learning words and speaking is the earliest form of productive communication. Developing listening and reading comprehension is classified as receptive communication. The acquisition of writing skills is a form of productive communication. Both types of communication are tools for learning. The definition of literacy has evolved through cultural change from oral, reading, and writing to include visual, musical, technical, numeracy, and information literacies.

To describe literacy, what other literacies would you include that facilitate learning?

A literacy narrative is a type of autobiographical essay that often tells the story of learning to read or write. It is reflective writing that describes the process and growth of learning. Narratives are a way of telling a personal story through remembrance and introspection.

A literacy narrative is based on life events. This means it is your experience of literacy, you may or may not love to read and write. Tell your story. To describe what you experienced, consider how to include specific details, who, what, when, where, why, and how.

• Who taught you?
• What changed or made an impact on learning?
• Recount a memory of the time when developing literacy made a difference.
• To describe where may include a place and/or an emotional state.
• Explain why it matters.
• Describe how literacy met a want or need and/or how it worked out.

Telling the Story

• Describe the setting of a main event.
• Blend in sensory images of sights, sounds, textures, smells, and tastes that manifest a personal experience.
• Incorporate dialogue, including what was said can add an emotional connection to a narrative.
• Include situations that build the plot: introduction, challenge, complication, inspiration, revelation, resolution to organize and add interest.

Stories are most often told in chronological order. Consider if that is the best way to tell the story.

• Chronologically, from beginning to end.
• Start in the middle.
• Start at the end.

Read your assignment and rubric to note the criteria, markers of quality, and rating scale and scoring before brainstorming your approach to the literacy narrative.

• If the assignment and rubric do not make clear what the professor expects, take the opportunity to ask questions.
• Typical criteria include writing style, focus, length, and due date(s).
• Typical quality markers include  clear  language and error-free, consistent organization, context, audience, purpose, evaluation, critical thinking.
• Typical rating scale may include how criteria determines elements of the narrative from mastery to inadequate.
• Last Updated: Mar 3, 2022 1:29 PM
• URL: https://jefferson.kctcs.libguides.com/literacy-narratives

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Deeper Learning: Defining Twenty-First Century Literacy

Only a decade and a few years in, how can we fully describe the twenty-first century learner? So far, this we do know: She is a problem solver, critical thinker, and an effective collaborator and communicator. We also know that a deeper learning environment is required in order to nurture and grow such a learner.

Watch a high school student talk about developing 21st-century skills through deeper learning.

How about that last characteristic of a 21st-century learner, effective communicator? Being literate means one who is advanced at reading, writing, speaking, and listening. And, in all schools -- deeper learning driven or not -- literacy is a curriculum fundamental. Its importance President Obama explained in a speech a few years back:

In today's world, being literate requires much, much more than the traditional literacy of yesterday. According to the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English), twenty-first century readers and writers need to:

• Gain proficiency with tools of technology
• Develop relationships with others and confront and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
• Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

In the Classroom

When it comes to effective communicator, we can no longer consider college and career ready as simply sending students out as good readers and writers. As the definition of literacy evolves in our world, so does the charge of schools in helping students work towards and gain mastery of the skills and abilities NCTE has outlined above. Let's take a look at some of those:

Gain proficiency with tools of technology. The greatest tech tool of all? The Internet. It undoubtedly gives access to an unending wealth of information and has revolutionized our lives. I remember years ago trying to fix my lawnmower. I went to three public libraries trying to find a lawnmower manual that was close enough to my machine to be useful. Now? Go to YouTube and someone will take you step-by-step through repairing or making just about anything and everything.

But for all the amazing, valuable stuff on the Web, there's loads of misinformation, half-truths, and misquoted, useless stuff. In preparing children to be literate in today's world, it's urgent that we teach the skill of scoping websites with a critical eye. Kids need to be explicitly trained in spotting everything from blatant pseudo-facts to slightly questionable content. This ability to "filter" will be required of them in both university and work.

Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts and manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information. The term multimedia, which means using more than one medium of expression or creation to communicate, encompasses a great deal more than it did 10, or even five years ago. To convey their deeper learning of a new concept, I remember having students include with their written analysis a printed graph, chart or image, and later, I required they add some audio or video element or links from websites. Now, students are creating websites as the task itself. A flat, inanimate thing like a written report or essay -- or a book or newspaper, for that matter -- is no longer the paradigm of communication.

Communication today is like a living thing, morphing continuously -- a hybrid of script, interactive, audio, and moving images. What does this mean for teachers and students? Schools need to be preparing students to masterfully navigate, judge, and create this type of sophisticated communication -- and do so quickly and efficiently.

What's Next?

It's true that, through deeper learning, many teachers and schools are already guiding students into this new century well-equipped to think critically on their feet, problem solve, and communicate effectively. But as we enter our thirteenth year, we need to stay mindful that the definition for 21st century learner -- and literacy -- will continue to change.

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

1 Literacy Narrative

The foundation of our course is built on the ability to read closely and critically. To engage with this skill, and the multiple literacies we navigate on a daily basis, this first major essay is a personal piece in which you will explore a significant moment regarding your own literacy; you may approach literacy either in the traditional sense or using our expanded, modern definition. 

Course objectives

• Develop rhetorical knowledge
• Develop critical and creative thinking
• Develop experience in writing Recall previous experience with various types of reading

Module objectives

During the process of completing this assignment, writers will:

• Recall previous experience with various types of reading
• Identify personal goals for academic reading and writing
• Distinguish the different purposes for academic reading and writing
• Give examples of familiar genres

ASSIGNMENT SHEET

Assignment Sheet – Literacy Narrative

The foundation of this course is built on your ability to read closely and critically. To engage with this skill, and the multiple literacies we navigate on a daily basis, this first major essay is a personal piece in which you will explore a significant moment regarding your own literacy; you may approach literacy either in the traditional sense or using our expanded, modern definition.

Literacy is a key component of academic success, as well as professional success. In this class and others, you will be asked to read and engage with various types of texts, so the purpose of this assignment is twofold. First, this assignment will allow you to write about something important to you, using an open form and personal tone instead of an academic one, allowing you to examine some of your deepest convictions and experiences and convey these ideas in a compelling way through writing. Second, this essay provides us an opportunity to get to know each other as a class community.

For this assignment you should imagine your audience to be an academic audience. Your audience will want a good understanding of your literacy, past, present, or future, and how you seek to comprehend the texts around you.

Requirements:

Choose ONE prompt below to tell about an important time in your life when you engaged with or were confronted with literacy, using the traditional or broad definition. We’ll discuss various types of literacy, so you will identify and define the type of literacy you’re discussing.

• Describe a situation when you were challenged in your reading by describing the source of that challenge (vocabulary, length, organization, something else). How did you overcome that challenge to understand what the text was saying? What strategies or steps do you plan to take in the future to make the process easier?
• Describe the type of texts you read (watch, listen to, etc.) most often. What makes them easy or challenging to read and interpret? What strategies do you use to ensure that you fully understand them or can apply them?
• Describe what kind of texts you think you will have to read or interpret in the future and where you will encounter these texts (i.e. future classes, your career, etc.). How do you think they might challenge you? What strategies will you use to overcome these difficulties?

Formatting:

• Narratives should be between 500-600 words (around 2-3 pages). Be concise, and choose your details carefully.
• Your work must be typed in size 12, Times New Roman font and double spaced, 1” margins, following MLA requirements.

Week 1: Introducing Rhetoric

The foundation of our course is built on your ability to read closely and critically. To engage with this skill, and the multiple literacies we navigate on a daily basis, this project is a personal piece in which you will explore a significant moment regarding your own literacy; you may approach literacy either in the traditional sense or using our expanded, modern definition.

Exploring Literacy

What comes to mind when you hear the term “ literacy “? Traditionally, we can define literacy as the ability to read and write. To be literate is to be a reader and writer. More broadly, this term has come to be used in other fields and specialties and refers generally to an ability or competency.

For example, you could refer to music literacy as the ability to read and write music; there are varying levels of literacy, so while you may recognize the image below as a music staff and the symbols for musical notes, it’s another thing to name the notes, to play any or multiple instruments, or to compose music.

Or, you may be a casual football fan, but to be football literate , you would need to be able to understand and read the playbook, have an understanding of the positions, define terms like “offsides” or “holding” as they relate to the sport, and interpret the hand signals used by the referees.

Educator and writer Shaelynn Faarnsworth describes and defines literacy as “social” and “constantly changing.” In this unit, we’ll explore literacy as a changing, dynamic process. By expanding our definition of literacy, we’ll come to a better understanding of our skills as readers and writers. We’ll use this discussion so that you, as writers, can better understand and write about “…what skills [you] get and what [you] don’t, [and include your] interests, passions, and quite possibly YouTube.”

Checking In: Questions and Activities

• Consider our expanded definition of literacy . In what ways are you literate?
• When, where, and how do you read and write on a daily basis?
• Thinking of traditional literacy (reading and writing), what successes or challenges have you faced in school, at home, in the workplace, etc.?

Close Reading Strategies: Introducing the Conversation Model

Reading is a necessary step in the writing process. One helpful metaphor for the writing process is the conversation model. Imagine approaching a group of friends who are in the middle o

f an intense discussion. Instead of interrupting and blurting out the first thing you think of, you would listen. Then as you listen, you may need to ask questions to catch up and gain a better understanding of what has already been said. Finally, once you have this thorough understanding, you can feel prepared to add your ideas, challenge, and further the conversation.

Similarly, when writing, the first step is to read. Like listening, this helps you understand the topic better and approach the issues you’re discussing with more knowledge. With that understanding, you can start to ask more specific questions, look up definitions, and start to do more driven research. With all that information, then you can offer a new perspective on what others have already written. As you write, you may go through this process — listening, researching, and writing — several times!

This unit focuses first on the importance of reading. There are two important ways we’ll think about reading in this course. Close reading and critical reading are both important processes with difference focuses. Close reading is a process to understand what is being said. It’s often used in summaries, where the goal is to comprehend and report on what a text is communicating. Compared to critical reading, an analytical process focused on how and why an idea is presented, close reading forces us to slow down and identify the meaning of the information. This skill is especially important in summaries and accurately quoting and paraphrasing.

Close reading, essentially, is like listening to the conversation. Both focus on comprehension and being able to understand and report back on what is written or said. In this project,

• Within close reading, your processes could be further broken down into pre-reading, active reading, and post-reading strategies. What do you focus on before and after you read a text?
• Have your instructors asked you to annotate a text?
• Do you find yourself copying down important lines, highlighting, or making notes as you read?
• What strategies do you rely on to actively and closely read?
• What are your least favorite strategies?

The Rhetorical Situation

You may have heard of “rhetorical questions” or gotten frustrated watching the news when a commentator dismisses another by saying “that’s just empty rhetoric” — but what does rhetoric mean? With definitions dating back to Aristotle and Plato, this is a complex concept with many historical and contemporary definitions. We define rhetoric as the ways language and other communication strategies are used to achieve a purpose with an audience. Below, we’ll explore the rhetorical situation, examining how many different factors contribute to how a writer can achieve their goals, and what may influence them to make different decisions.

The rhetorical situation is composed of many interactive pieces that each depend on the other. Let’s start by defining each component:

• Ask yourself: Who created this?
• Ask yourself: Who is likely to, or supposed to, see this?
• Ask yourself: What am I looking at?
• Ask yourself: Why was the text created?
• Ask yourself: When was this created? How did it get developed? Where was the text published? What shaped the creative process?

Each of these categories intersects and influences the other. When we think about a complete rhetorical situation, you’ll need to define all these different pieces to best understand the text. As we begin practicing close reading, drawing the rhetorical situation will be a helpful tool.

Let’s examine this project, the literacy narrative.

• Author : You! While you have a unique background, you’re a student in this course, and your individual writing experience will influence what you write about.
• Audience : Your classmates and instructor. This is a collaborative course, and your instructor will read what you produce.
• Text : Literacy Narrative. This type of text has different goals and requirements. We’ve examined literacy already, and we’ll review narratives soon. Together, these guidelines will help us construct this specific type of text (rather than a poem about reading or your personal memoir about how you became a writer!).
• Purpose : To reflect. To introduce yourself. To define your literacy. These are all goals of this assignment. Throughout your assignment, you’ll want to check in with yourself and ensure that you’re accomplishing these goals. If not, you won’t meet the demands of the assignment.
• Context : This assignment — the assignment sheet above has specific requirements that will influence what you create. Your writing background — no one else has the same life experience with reading and writing as you. The goals of the course — there are specific tasks to accomplish with this project that are specific to CO1 objectives. Each of these aspects will influence how you put the project together. Since you didn’t just wake up and decide to write about literacy, the context of this assignment will determine what you create.
• Which of the elements of the rhetorical triangle influence your writing decisions most? Why?
• Are there any elements you don’t consider? Why don’t they seem as important?

Week 2: Defining Narrative and Organization

This week, you’ll review the assignment more fully, begin drafting, and work more closely with feedback from others. A literacy narrative is a specific type of genre, so there are certain requirements for this text. Using examples from other students, we’ll begin to develop your first draft.

Introducing the Literacy Narrative

narrative : a method of story-telling  

A literacy narrative is a common genre for writers who want to explore their own experiences with writing. Just Google “literacy narrative” and find endless examples! While this assignment will respond to specific prompts and follow a more specific structure than some of the examples you’ll find on Google, there is a common theme in each essay that revolves around your relationship with literacy. Week one defined literacy ,  but what about narrative? Narrative can be defined as a method of story-telling. In the simplest terms, your goal in this literacy narrative, in this assignment, is to tell the story of your personal experience with literacy, either from a past event, something you’re working with now, or looking to the future. Let’s review the three sets of prompts from the assignment sheet:

Each of these prompts gives you the chance to tell your story and examine your experience with a specific type of literacy. As you consider the prompts, think about how you could tell a story to answer these questions. With this frame of mind, review the questions and activities below.

• Which prompt from the assignment sheet will you address? Why does this prompt appeal to you?
• Consider the brainstorming you did about the ways that you are literate. Which prompt matches those skills best? Are these skills you struggled with at first, skills you currently practice, or a skill that you’re learning and will use in the future? Use these notes to decide which set of questions you’ll focus on in this project.

Organization: PIE Method

Each prompt includes three questions, which we’ll use as the starting point for three paragraphs. In each set of prompts, your first paragraph will describe the text; remember, when thinking about reading a text, we can interpret this broadly, like with music and sports. The second paragraph will explore the challenges or successes you’ve experienced. Then, the third paragraph will focus on strategies and techniques for improvement. This way, you can tell a more complete story of your experience, sharing the details and emotions along the way and making readers feel like they’re right there with you. But how do you capture all this detail in a way that helps you organize your thoughts and keep your reader interested in the story?

We’ll use a formula for the paragraph structure called PIE, which stands for Point, Information, and Explanation. This method will help you plan what you want to say, and then give examples so you can show why each step was so important to you. Let’s review each part of the paragraph, and then we’ll look at how this applies to your literacy narrative with a student sample.

• In the literacy narrative: Since each paragraph responds to a question from the prompt, the Point of each paragraph should tell readers which question you’re answering. By rephrasing the question in your Point, you can signal to your classmates and instructor so that they know which question you’re answering.
• In the literacy narrative: Most of your evidence, in a narrative, will be from your experience. Report what happened, what you read, or what you learned. Naming these details can help your readers see through your eyes when you give specific examples.
• In the literacy narrative: Help your readers get inside your head and feel like they’re with you. Keeping the Point in mind and showing how all these ideas relate will bring the paragraph together by developing each example clearly and offering a thoughtful response to each prompt. How did you feel about the examples from the Information? Why was it was so significant? Why should your readers care about this experience? Answering these questions will help show your readers what you experienced so they can understand the significance and connect with you.

Together, these pieces all come together to create a strong, developed paragraph that responds to the question from the prompt more fully.

• Below is a sample paragraph that follows the PIE structure. It is coded for the different parts of the paragraph above, with the Point in bold , the  Information in italics , and the  Explanation underlined . The second paragraph has been shortened and has not been coded. First, review the parts of the coded example. Then, review and identify PIE in the paragraph.

Planning a Draft

Now that we’ve reviewed all the components and the foundation for this assignment, you’re ready to begin your draft! We’ll focus just on the first paragraph here, but you can use these steps for each paragraph to construct your draft.

Consider the first question from each prompt, copied below, to decide if you’ll focus on a past experience, the present, or the future:

• Describe a situation when you were challenged in your reading by describing the source of that challenge (vocabulary, length, organization, something else).  
• Describe the type of texts you read (watch, listen to, etc.) most often.  
• Describe what kind of texts you think you will have to read or interpret in the future and where you will encounter these texts (i.e. future classes, your career, etc.).  

Literacy Narrative Rough Draft

Using your brainstorming from previous weeks, and using the student sample as a reference, begin drafting using the PIE structure, following these steps below to build the first paragraph of your draft. This is just a first draft, so let yourself write freely! This doesn’t need to be perfect or even good — instead, the goal is to put ideas on paper.

• In your Point, rephrase one of the questions above. You can borrow some of this same language to signal to your readers and show which question you’re answering. Remember, this only introduces the main idea — no details yet!
• Review your brainstorming. Did you name specific examples? Add these to your paragraph to develop the Information. Name at least two examples. Each example you give should connect to the Point, providing evidence from your experience.
• Review the examples and start to Explain. How did you feel about the examples from the Information? Why was it was so significant? Why should your readers care about this experience? Ask yourself these questions for each example you include.
• Depending on your drafting process, it might be easy to tackle all three paragraphs at once and get everything down, or you might prefer to write one paragraph at a time.
• Throughout the course, practice with drafting one paragraph per day, or setting a timer to see what you can write in a specific amount of time.
• Review what you’ve written, and see if there are more details to add. Remember, the goal is to get as much as you can out of your head. Revisions will take place next.

Week 3: Peer Review and Revision

Peer review.

Peer review is an important part of the drafting process. It helps us learn from our classmates and see our own work in a different way. Writing can be a lonely and isolating experience that makes the process frustrating and unsatisfying. Getting to share your work with others can break that uncomfortable pattern!

That said, you may be new to sharing your work or have different experiences with peer review. Good peer reviews can spark creativity, help build on good ideas, and revise the rougher ideas. But, sometimes peer review can be challenging if your peer is too critical or too complementary, or maybe you can’t read and understand what they wrote! The tips below will help reinforce best practices, as well as avoid some common mistakes with peer review.

When completing peer review, one important rule is to focus on the big picture and NOT to edit. Think about it like this: If you add a comma, then you’ve helped make one sentence of the paper better. In a paper that’s 1,000 words long, that’s not so helpful! Instead, consider the rhetorical triangle. If you can make observations and ask questions to help your classmate understand the audience or the genre better, then the entire paper is going to improve, because you focused on a higher order concept that affects not just one sentence, but the paragraph and the whole paper. Throughout these projects, we’ll practice several strategies for peer review so you can see several example methods and find what works best for you.

Peer workshop

When you sit down with your peer’s paper, we’ll practice a three-step process. This gives you a chance to explain exactly what you mean while offering specific advice for your peer. Review the steps below:

• Observe : Make a statement or summarize what you see. Identifying a pattern in your peer’s work or repeating what you think your peer is saying can help your peer know if they’re communicating clearly. Using the rhetorical triangle to support these observations could be a helpful strategy!
• Explain : Critique what you see, explaining if the writer has a strong idea or if it might need work. U sing adjectives to describe what’s going well or what’s not working is important so that you peer can learn more about your observation. Was this “clear” or “confusing”? Is the writer “engaging and interesting” or is the writing “plain and repetitive”?
• EXAMPLE: 1) You give a few examples for information, then a sentence of explanation. 2) It doesn’t look like this meets the word limits from the assignment sheet, and I’m not sure which part you’ll focus on as the main form of literacy. 3) Could you clarify this? More explanation about why these are important could help you meet the word limit, too!

All together, these comments will need to be a few sentences long. Since we’re NOT focused on grammar or editing, the changes that your peer can make will have a big effect on the final product. With these more developed comments, your goal is to make 1-2 comments per paragraph. Give your classmate something to consider, using our course vocabulary, to really help them improve. As you read and practice this method, it’s likely that you’ll get ideas for your own paper, which makes this process doubly helpful!

Assignment Rubric

• Will clearly and accurately define a specific type of literacy, explaining the connection and development of literacy. Will clearly establish the identity of the writer and the influence and importance of literacy.
• Will communicate significant experiences to an academic audience. Will give the reader something new to consider. Will interest the reader through storytelling.
• Will remain focused on literacy and the individual prompts. Will include specific details from a variety of experiences. Will engage readers with details and examples. Will explain the connections and development of growth through chosen examples.
• Will follow PIE structure closely.
• Will be clear and readable without distracting grammar, punctuation or spelling errors.

A “B” (good) summary (80% +):

• The concept of literacy may not be as clearly connected or central  to the writer’s development.
• More attention could be paid to engage or interest the readers. May lack context to help the reader understand the writer’s experience.
• Focus may lack through discussing events outside of the prompts. May include few specific examples. May lack explanation to show connection between examples.
• PIE may not be followed in one paragraph. Either the point, information, or explanation could be further developed or clarified within a paragraph.
• The writer may need to work on communicating information more effectively. The narrative will be generally clear and readable but may need further editing for grammatical errors.

A “C” (satisfactory) summary (70% +):

• Literacy is not defined or explained clearly in connection to skill.
• Awareness of audience is lacking, making sections confusing for an unfamiliar reader.
• Prompts may not be clearly connected to the paragraphs. Examples are not included or are not clearly explained.
• PIE may be missing or underdeveloped in multiple paragraphs.
• “C” narratives may also need more editing for readability.

A “D” (poor) summary (60% +):

• Will show an attempt toward the assignment goals that has fallen short. May have several of the above problems.

An “F” (failing) summary:

• ignores the assignment.
• has been plagiarized.
• Review the same sample paragraph below from a previous student. Identify one strength and one area for improvement in the draft, following the 3-step method above. As you review, consider how to balance praise and criticism. Something is going well in your peer’s draft, and something can be improved!

Most of this week revolves around drafting activities. This week brings our first revisions and peer reviews, an important part of the writing process. With your peers, you’ll get to review what they’ve been working on while receiving feedback on your own work. Similar to the sample, it will be your responsibility to identify strengths and praise your peers’ writing, as well as identify areas for improvement and explain why this is an important revision they must make.

Applying Peer Review: Taking Suggestions and Revising

Once you’ve completed peer review, you’ll likely have lots of ideas — reviewing others’ work often ignites a creative spark for your own work! You should feel free to apply strategies from your peers and reexamine your work, but you want to focus on your peers’ suggestions for you. This way, you can see how your ideas and their commentary lines up. In our 3-step feedback process, the last step is to make a suggestion. While the notes from your peers should be valuable, it’s ultimately your draft and your decision about what feedback to include. As you read through the commentary, review the assignment sheet, and begin making changes to the draft. This is one of the most important steps in the writing process and what makes the difference between a rough first draft and a polished, complete draft.

Suggested schedule and pacing

This module is intended to take 3 weeks and would work well as a first, introductory assignment or as a final, reflective assignment. Each unit is designed to help instructors offer feedback at critical stages of the drafting process, assisting writers strategically before they offer their drafts for peer review. This does require a quick turnaround from instructors; for planning this three-week unit, drafts would be due to you after the two-week mark, and peer review is recommended to take place a few days after, once your feedback can be reviewed and used for revisions. This necessarily leads to less intensive feedback on the final drafts, helping to disperse workload and making for faster turnaround of final submissions.

Writers may experience typical growing pains throughout these assignments, especially when used as a first assessment and adjust to your style and teaching practice. Overall, writers seem motivated and engaged in the narrative aspect and less intimidated when starting the course with a less formal, less academic assignment. This is intentional so that everyone begins from a familiar place. As a last, reflective project, this can be used to help writers process and digest rhetorical concepts and their growth throughout the semester.

This unit focuses on close reading skills and introspection to allow students to orient themselves to writing in a constructive and open-minded way. By focusing on literacy and setting the tone for the semester, students tend to be more receptive to rhetorical concepts and understand the time investment required for this course.

Assessment notes

Through this three-week unit, students will explore their past  literacies and expand the definition of literacy  beyond  the traditional sense  to grow comfortable and familiar with the idea of reading and writing in academic English.   

the ability to read and write; more broadly, a specific ability to navigate a specialized discipline

Close reading is a process to understand what is being said.

the ways language and other communication strategies are used to achieve a purpose with an audience

a method of story-telling

First-Year Composition Copyright © by Leslie Davis and Kiley Miller is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Editorial and production teams, the mast project, five essays, ready for newer annotations, centering on theories about oral traditions: orality and literacy – essay one.

Five essays, ready for newer annotations, centering on theories about oral traditions

Essay 1. Orality and literacy.

2022.12.19 | By Gregory Nagy

Originally published 2001 in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric , ed. T. O. Sloane, 532–538; Oxford. In this online version, the original page-numbers of the printed version are indicated within braces (“{” and “}”). For example, “{532|533}” indicates where p. 532 of the printed version ends and p. 533 begins.

§1. The concept of orality stems from ethnographic descriptions of oral poetry in particular and of oral traditions in general. A foundational work is The Singer of Tales , by Albert B. Lord (1960; posthumous 2 nd ed. 2000, with new introduction by Stephen Mitchell and Gregory Nagy; 3 rd ed. 2019 by David F. Elmer). This book documents the pioneering research of Milman Parry on oral traditions in the former Yugoslavia, 1933-35 (collected papers, Parry 1971). Parry died in 1935, at the beginning of his academic career, before he could publish the results of his research on living oral traditions. His publications are limited almost entirely to his earlier research, which was based on the textual evidence of Homeric poetry. Parry was a professor of ancient Greek, seeking new answers to the so-called “Homeric Question,” which centered on the historical circumstances that led to the composition of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey . Basically, the “question” came down to this: were the Homeric poems composed with or without the aid of writing? Parry’s project, the comparing of Homeric poetry with the living oral traditions of South Slavic heroic poetry, led him to conclude that the Homeric texts were indeed the products of oral composition. Parry’s research was continued after his death by his student, Albert Lord, who conducted his own fieldwork in the former Yugoslavia (especially 1950-51). Lord’s Singer of Tales represents the legacy of their combined efforts.

§2. The cumulative work of Parry and Lord is generally considered to be the single most successful solution to the “Homeric Question,” though the debate among Classicists continues concerning the historical contingencies of Homeric composition. The ultimate success of Parry and Lord, however, can best be measured by tracking the applicability {532|533} of their methods to a wide range of literatures and pre-literatures beyond the original focus on ancient Greek literature.

§3. In the case of pre-literatures, Lord’s Singer of Tales has become a foundational work for the ethnographic study of oral traditions in all their many varieties, and the range of living oral traditions is world-wide: Scottish ballads, folk-preaching in the American South, Xhosa praise poetry, and the list can be extended to hundreds of other examples (bibliography in Foley 1985; the journal Oral Tradition , founded by John M. Foley in 1986, gives an idea of the vast range: see the representative entries in the Bibliography below).

§4. In the case of literatures, the application of the Parry-Lord method to ancient Greek traditions was extended by Lord to medieval traditions in Old English and Old French, and it has been further extended by other scholars to Old Norse, Middle English, Middle High German, Irish, Welsh, and other medieval European traditions. Even further, the Parry-Lord method has been applied to a vast variety of non-European literatures, including classical Arabic and Persian, Indic, and Chinese traditions (again, see the representative entries in the Bibliography below).

§5. In effect, then, the methodology of Parry and Lord has transcended the “Homeric Question.” Their work has led to an essential idea that goes far beyond the historical context of Homeric poetry or of any other tradition. That idea, as formulated by Parry and Lord, is that oral traditions formed the basis of literary traditions.

§6. This is not to say that such thinking was without precedent. In fact, it did evolve ultimately from far earlier phases of debate among Classicists focusing on the “Homeric Question.” Prototypical versions of the idea can be found in the Homeric theorizing of François Hédelin, Abbé d’Aubignac (already as of 1664; posthumous publication 1715), Thomas Blackwell (1735), Giambattista Vico (1744), and Robert Wood (private publication 1767; posthumous edition 1769). The evolving idea reached a decisive phase in the work of two of history’s most influential editors of Homer, Jean Baptiste Gaspard d’Ansse de Villoison ( Prolegomena to his edition of the codex “ Venetus A ” of the Iliad , 1788) and Friedrich August Wolf ( Prolegomena , 1795, to his editions of the Iliad , 1804, and Odyssey , 1807). Both of these Classicists posited a prehistory of oral poetry in the evolution of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey . The notion of such a preliterate phase in the history of ancient Greek epic is also at work in the 1802 Iliad commentary of another major figure in the Classics, Christian Gottlob Heyne. The impact of such notions encouraged a romantic view of oral poetry, as exemplified most prominently by Johann Gottfried Herder, who compared the preliterate phases of Homeric poetry with Germanic folk traditions (Homer, ein Günstling der Zeit , 1795). Romantic views of oral poetry led to the creation of literary folkloristic syntheses like Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala (1849; first ed. 1835), based on genuine Finnish oral traditions. The romantic literary appropriation of oral traditions could easily lead to abuses: some such literary productions were of dubious ethnographic value, as in the case of James Macpherson’s re-creations of Scottish highlands folklore in The Complete Works of Ossian (1765).

§7. Given all these precedents, we may well ask: why, then, is it Parry and Lord who are primarily credited with the definitive formulation of the general idea that oral traditions formed the basis of literary traditions? The answer is straightforward: Parry and Lord were the first to perfect a systematic way of comparing the internal evidence of living oral traditions, as observed in their “fieldwork,” with the internal evidence of literary traditions. It is primarily their methodology that we see reflected in the ongoing academic usage of such terms as orality and oral theory . (On the pitfalls of using the term oral theory , see Nagy 1996.19-20).

§8. The systematic comparatism of Parry and Lord required rigorous empiricism in analyzing the internal evidence of the living oral traditions – in their case, the South Slavic evidence – which was to be compared with the textual evidence of Homer. To be sure, there have also been other models of internal analysis: an outstanding example is the ethnographic research of Matija Murko on the epics of South Slavic Muslim peoples in the regions of Bosnia and Hercegovina (1913; see especially Lord 1960.280-281n1). Another distinguished forerunner was Wilhelm Radloff, who investigated the Kara Kirghiz oral {533|534} poetic traditions of Central Asia (1887; see Lord 1960.281n4). Such projects, however, were primarily descriptive, not comparative. In the case of Central Asian epics, for example, the systematic application of comparative methodology, as evident in the work of Karl Reichl (2000), is founded directly on the work of Parry and Lord.

§9. What primarily distinguishes Parry and Lord from their predecessors, then, is their development of a systematic comparative approach to the study of oral traditions. The point of departure for their comparative work, which happened to be primarily the Muslim epic traditions of the former Yugoslavia, gave them an opportunity to test the living interactions of oral and literary traditions. They observed that the prestige of writing as a technology, and of the culture of literacy that it fostered, tended to destabilize the culture of oral traditions – in the historical context that they were studying. What they observed, however, was strictly a point of comparison with other possible test cases, not some kind of universalizing formulation (Mitchell and Nagy 2000.xiii; pace Finnegan 1976). For example, Lord himself makes it clear in his later work that there exist many cultures where literary traditions do not cause the destabilization of oral traditions and can even coexist with them (Lord 1991; see also especially Lord 1986b). In general, the textualization or Verschriftung of any given oral tradition needs to be distinguished from Verschriftlichung – that is, from the evolution of any given culture of literacy, any given Schriftlichkeit (Oesterreicher 1993).

§10. For Parry and Lord, the opposition of literacy and orality – of Schriftlichkeit and Mündlichkeit – is a cultural variable, not a universal. Further, their fieldwork experiments led them to think of literacy and orality as cognitive variables as well (Mitchell and Nagy 2000.xiv). Even further, just as orality defies universalization, so also does literacy. The mechanics and even the concepts of reading and writing vary from culture to culture (Nagy 1998; cf. Svenbro 1993). A striking case in point is the cultural variability of such phenomena as scriptio continua and “silent reading” (Nagy 2000, Gavrilov 1997).

§11. For Parry and Lord, the histories of literary and oral traditions, of literatures and pre-literatures, were interrelated. To underline his observation that the mechanics and esthetics of oral and literary traditions are historically linked, Lord would even speak of “oral literature” (see Lord 1995, especially chapter 8). Further, Lord developed the comparative study of oral and literary traditions into a new branch of Comparative Literature (Guillén 1993.173-179). It is no accident that Lord’s Singer of Tales was originally published in a Comparative Literature monograph series, and that the author of the Preface of 1960 was Harry Levin, who at the time figured as the doyen of the new field of Comparative Literature – and who had actually taken part in Lord’s thesis defense (Mitchell and Nagy 2000.xvii).

§12. Despite this stance of Parry and Lord, it has been claimed – many times and in many ways – that the Parry-Lord “theory” is founded on a hard-and-fast distinction between orality and literacy. These claims stem from unfamiliarity with the ethnographic dimension of Parry’s and Lord’s work, and, more generally, from ignorance about the observable mechanics and esthetics of oral traditions. Such unfamiliarity fuels prejudices, as reflected in the criticism directed at Lord for even attempting to undertake a comparison of South Slavic oral traditions with the literary traditions represented by the high cultures of the Classical and medieval civilizations of Western Europe. The implicit presupposition, that oral traditions are inferior to the esthetic standards of Western literature, is tied to romanticized notions about distinctions between literacy and orality (Mitchell and Nagy 2000.xiv):

Much of this kind of criticism, as Lord documents in his later books [1991 and 1995], has been shaped also by an overall ignorance of the historical facts concerning literacy and its cultural implications in the Balkans. Besides this additional obstacle, there is yet another closely related one: many Western scholars romanticize literacy itself as if it were some kind of uniform and even universal phenomenon – exempt from the historical contingencies of cultural and even cognitive variations. Such romanticism, combined with an ignorance of the ideological implications of literacy in the South Slavic world, have led to a variety of deadly prejudices against any and all kinds of oral traditions. In some cases, these prejudices have gone hand in hand with a resolute {534|535} blindness to the potential ideological agenda of literacy in its historical contexts.

§13. Thus the danger of romanticism is two-sided: much as some humanists of the nineteenth century romanticized oral tradition as if it were some kind of universal phenomenon in and of itself, humanists today may be tempted to romanticize literacy as the key to “literature,” often equated with “high” culture (on empirical approaches to distinctions between “high” and “low” culture, as occasionally formalized in distinctions between oral and written traditions, see Bausinger 1980).

§14. And yet, the only universal distinction between oral and literary traditions is the historical anteriority of the first to the second. Beyond this obvious observation, it is pointless to insist on any universalizing definitions for the “oral” of “oral tradition.” “Oral tradition” and “oral poetry” are terms that depend on the concepts of “written tradition” and “written poetry.” In cultures that do not depend on the technology of writing, the concept of orality is meaningless (Lord 1995.105n26). From the standpoint of comparative ethnography, “Written is not something that is not oral; rather it is something in addition to being oral, and that additional something varies from society to society” (Nagy 1990.8). The absence of this technology has nothing to do with whether there can or cannot be poetics or rhetoric. Poetics and rhetoric exist without writing.

§15. A common misconception about oral traditions is that they are marked by a lack of organization, cohesiveness, unity. The problem here, again, is a general unfamiliarity with the ethnographic evidence from living oral traditions, which can be used to document a wide variety of poetics and rhetoric (see especially Lord 1995). The verbal art or Kunstsprache of oral traditions can reach levels of virtuosity that are indirectly or sometimes even directly comparable to what is admired in the classics of script and print cultures. In some cultural contexts, the Kunstsprache of oral traditions can be even more precise than that of counterparts in literary traditions, because the genres of oral poetics and rhetoric tend to be more regularly observed (Smith 1974, Ben Amos 1976, Slatkin 1987). In the history of literature, genres can become irregular through a striving for individual greatness: if we follow the perspective of Benedetto Croce (1902), a literary work is great because it defies genres, because it is sui generis .

§16. By contrast, the forms of genres in oral traditions are sustained by the forms of everyday speech in everyday life. Thus the Kunstsprache of oral tradition allows its participants to “connect,” even in modern times (Martin 1993.227): “Modern hearers of a traditional epic in cultures where the song making survives are observed to comment appreciatively on the smallest verbal changes, not in the way a three-year-old demands the exact words of a bedtime text, but with a full knowledge of the dozens of ways the teller could have spun out a line at a given point in the narrative. In a living oral tradition, people are exposed to verbal art constantly, not just on specific entertainment occasions, which can happen every night in certain seasons. When they work, eat, drink, and do other social small-group activities, myth, song, and saying are always woven into their talk. Consequently, it is not inaccurate to describe them as bilingual, fluent in their natural language but also in the Kunstsprache of their local verbal art forms.”

Bibliography, with comments, dating up to 2001

Bakker, E. J. 1997. Poetry in Speech. Orality and Homeric Discourse . Ithaca. An empirical study of syntactical patterns typical of oral traditions and even of “everyday” speech, as preserved in the text of the Homeric poems.

Bauman, R. 1977. Verbal Art as Performance . Prospect Heights, IL. A sophisticated analysis of various types and degrees of interaction between performance and composition as combined aspects of oral traditions.

Bausinger, H. 1980. Formen der “Volkspoesie. ” 2nd ed. Berlin. A historical study of culturally and ideologically determined distinctions between “high art” and “low art,” as associated respectively with literary and oral traditions.

Ben-Amos, D. 1976. “Analytical Categories and Ethnic Genres.” Folklore Genres,  ed. D. Ben-Amos, 215-242. Austin. A wide-ranging survey of variations in the forms and functions of genres in oral traditions.

Blackburn, S. H., P. J. Claus, J. B. Flueckiger, and S. S. Wadley, eds. 1989. Oral Epics in India . Berkeley and Los Angeles. Ethnographic approaches to oral traditions as analyzed {535|536} in their historical contexts, with special attention to the mechanics of diffusion (and the changes related to the widening or narrowing of the radius of diffusion). A striking example of the potential coextensiveness of oral and written traditions: oral traditions can aetiologize themselves in terms of written traditions (p. 32 n. 25).

Croce, B. 1902. Estetica . 2nd ed. Bari. A foundational meditation on creative tensions between great works of literature and the genres to which they are supposed to belong.

Davidson, O. M. 2000. Comparative Literature and Classical Persian Poetry . Bibliotheca Iranica: Intellectual Traditions Series no. 4. Costa Mesa CA. Explores the intellectual history of expanding the methodology of comparative literature by including the study of oral poetics, especially with reference to classical literary forms that stem ultimately from oral traditions.

Finnegan, R. 1976. “What is Oral Literature Anyway? Comments in the Light of Some African and Other Comparative Material.” Oral Literature and the Formula , ed. B. A. Stolz and R. S. Shannon, 127-166. Ann Arbor. Disputes any universalizing distinction between orality and literacy, claiming that Parry and Lord had sought to establish such a distinction. An underlying assumption in the book: that the concept of “oral” can be equated with anything that is performed. Both the claim and the assumption are disputed by Lord 1995.

Foley, J. M. 1985. Oral-Formulaic Theory and Research: An Introduction and Annotated Bibliography . New York. The editor’s Introduction offers a general survey of a wide range of oral traditions throughout the world, with extensive bibliography of ongoing research applying the methods of Parry, Lord, and others.

Gavrilov, A. K. 1997. “Techniques of Reading in Classical Antiquity.” Classical Quarterly 47:56-73. Investigates the cultural and cognitive variables of “silent reading” and reading out loud; concludes that a mutually exclusive dichotomy is untenable.

Goody, J., and Watt, I. 1968. “The Consequences of Literacy.” Literacy in Traditional Societies,  ed. J. Goody, 27-68 . Cambridge. Argues that literacy produces measurable differences in cognitive capacity; the argument is weakened by a lack of descriptive specificity in considering the forms of oral traditions in any given historical context.

Guillén, C. 1985. Entre lo uno y lo diverso. Introducción a la literatura comparada . Barcelona. = 1993. The Challenge of Comparative Literature. Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 42. Cambridge, MA. Situates the study of oral traditions within the academic discipline of Comparative Literature.

Johnson, J. W. 1980. “Yes, Virginia, There Is an Epic in Africa.” Research in African Literatures 11:308-326. A spirited polemic concerning the application of universalizing criteria in describing the genres of oral traditions.

Lord, A. B. 1953. “Homer’s Originality: Oral Dictated Texts.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 94:124-134. Rewritten, with minimal changes, in Lord 1991.38-48 (with an “Addendum 1990” at pp. 47-48). An engaging attempt to reconcile the transmitted text of the Homeric poems, as a historical given, with empirical observations about the process of composition-in-performance as found in living oral traditions.

Lord, A. B. 1960 / 2000 [/ 2019]. The Singer of Tales . Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 24. Cambridge, MA; 2 nd  ed., with new Introduction, by S. Mitchell and G. Nagy 2000[; 3 rd ed. 2019 by D. F. Elmer, Hellenic Studies 77, Publications of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature 4]. This book remains the most definitive introduction to the pioneering research of Parry and Lord. The first part documents their findings in the course of their ethnographic research on the living oral traditions that they recorded in the former Yugoslavia; the second part applies these findings as points of comparison with the {536|537} textual evidence of ancient Greek and medieval European epic.

Lord, A. B. 1974. “Perspectives on Recent Work on Oral Literature.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 10:1-21. A bibliographical essay surveying the ongoing research on oral traditions throughout the world. A vital supplement to the abbreviated bibliography given here.

Lord, A. B. 1986a. “Perspectives on Recent Work on the Oral Traditional Formula.” Oral Tradition 1:467-503. Continuation of the bibliographical survey in Lord 1974. Another vital supplement.

Lord, A. B. 1986b. “The Merging of Two Worlds: Oral and Written Poetry as Carriers of Ancient Values.” Oral Tradition in Literature: Interpretation in Context , ed. J. M. Foley, 19-64. Columbia, MO. A seminal study of historical coextensiveness between the poetry performed in the coffee houses, as observed by Parry and Lord, and the poetry of the court poets in the “good old days” of Ottoman rule.

Lord, A. B. 1991. Epic Singers and Oral Tradition . Ithaca. Explores oral “lyric” as well as “epic.” In-depth reassessments of debates over orality and literacy .

Lord, A. B. 1995. The Singer Resumes the Tale (ed. M. L. Lord). Ithaca. A posthumous publication, originally intended as a direct continuation of Singer of Tales. Sustained rebuttal of critics who insist on the inferiority of “orality” to literacy.

Martin, R. P. 1989. The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad. Ithaca. A case study of oral poetic sub-genres embedded within the “super-genre” of epic, with special attention to applications of “speech-act” theory.

Martin, R. P. 1993. “Telemachus and the Last Hero Song.” Colby Quarterly 29:222-240. A critical reassessment of epic as the essential genre of “heroic” poetry.

Mitchell, S., and G. Nagy. 2000. “Introduction to the Second Edition.” In: Lord 2000:vii-xxix. Offers historical background on the evolution of Lord’s work and on its connections to the earlier work of Parry. Summarizes the impact of Parry’s and Lord’s combined legacy on such fields as Classics, Comparative Literature, and folklore studies.

Nagy, G. 1990. Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past . Baltimore. Revised paperback version 1994. Examines the interactions of theme / formula / meter in both “epic” and “lyric” traditions, with special reference to the historical context of archaic Greece.

Nagy, G. 1996. Homeric Questions . Austin. Addresses ten basic “misreadings” of Parry and Lord; provides explanatory models for the historical contingencies of transition from oral to written traditions.

Nagy, G. 1998. “Homer as ‘Text’ and the Poetics of Cross-Reference.” Verschriftung und Verschriftlichung: Aspekte des Medienwechsels in verschiedenen Kulturen und Epochen,  ed. C. Ehler and U. Schaefer, 78-87. ScriptOralia 94. Tübingen.

Nagy, G. 2000. “Reading Greek Poetry Aloud: Evidence from the Bacchylides Papyri.” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 64:7-28. Examines phenomena of literacy that defy universalization, such as the practice of scriptio continua in archaic, classical, and post-classical Greek, to be contrasted with the practice of leaving spaces for word-boundaries, as in the traditions of writing Hebrew.

Nagy, J. F. 1986. “Orality in Medieval Irish Narrative.” Oral Tradition 1:272-301. A detailed survey of evidence provided by the contents and the conventions of the narratives themselves.

Niditch, S. 1996. Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature. Library of ancient Israel. Louisville, KY. A lively confrontation of scripture, as the ultimate written word, with the rhetoric of the spoken word.

Oesterreicher, W. 1993. “Verschriftung und Verschriftlichung im Kontext medialer und konzeptioneller Schriftlichkeit.” Schriftlichkeit im frühen Mittelalter,  ed. U. Schaefer, 267-292. Tübingen. Shows that the historical circumstances of transformations from non-literate to literate societies are notable for their diversity.

Okpewho, I. 1979. The Epic in Africa: Toward a Poetics of the Oral Performance . New York. A sound ethnographic and literary survey, leading to a critical reassessment of epic as a genre.

Opland, J. 1989. “Xhosa: The Structure of Xhosa Eulogy and the Relation of Eulogy to Epic.” Traditions of Heroic and Epic Poetry II: Characteristics and Techniques , ed. J. B. Hainsworth and A. T. Hatto, 121-143. London. This study describes a distinct genre, the praise poetry of the Xhosa, and then proceeds to compare it with the ancient Greek genre of epic. By recognizing praise poetry as distinct from epic, this work avoids the imposition of external models on the internal evidence of the oral tradition being examined.

Parry, M. [1971]. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry (ed. A. Parry). Oxford. The first part contains Parry’s work on the Homeric texts, before he undertook his fieldwork research in the former Yugoslavia. The second part combines his experience in fieldwork with his expertise in the organization of Homeric poetry.

Parry, M. 1928a. L’épithète traditionnelle dans Homère: Essai sur un problème de style homérique. Paris. Translation in Parry 1971:1–190. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Parry.LEpithete_Traditionnelle_dans_Homere.1928 .

Parry, M. 1928b. Les formules et la métrique d’Homère . Paris. Translation in Parry 1971:191–234. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_ParryM.Les_Formules_et_la_Metrique_d_Homere.1928 .

Parry, M. 1930. “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making: I. Homer and Homeric Style.”  Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 41:73–148. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:ParryM.Studies_in_the_Epic_Technique_of_Oral_Verse-Making1.1930 .

Parry, M. 1932. “Studies in the epic technique of oral verse-making. II: The Homeric language as the language of an oral poetry.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology  43:1–50. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:ParryM.Studies_in_the_Epic_Technique_of_Oral_Verse-Making2.1932 .

Radloff, W. 1885. Proben der Volksliteratur der nördlichen türkischen Stämme V: Der Dialekt der Kara-Kirgisen . St. Petersburg. A distinguished prototype of research in the “field,” with a focus on the oral traditions of Central Asia.

Reichl, K. 2000. Singing the Past: Turkic and Medieval Poetry. Ithaca. Continues where Radloff left off, a century later. Centers on typological parallels to the oral traditions studied by Parry and Lord.

Slatkin, L. M. 1987. “Genre and Generation in the Odyssey.” METIS: Revue d’Anthropologie du Monde Grec Ancien 1:259-268. Views genres in oral traditions as neatly complementary to each other, diachronically as well as synchronically.

Smith, P. 1974. “Des genres et des hommes.” Poétique 19:294-312. Acute synchronic perspectives on the complementarity of genres in oral traditions.

Svenbro, J. 1988. Phrasikleia: Anthropologie de la lecture en Grèce ancienne. Paris. = 1993. Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece. Translation by J. Lloyd. Ithaca. Disputes universalist definitions of reading as a cognitive activity. Examines the mentality of equating the activity of reading out loud with the act of lending one’s voice to the letters being processed by one’s eyes.

Toelken, J. B. 1967. “An Oral Canon for the Child Ballads: Construction and Application.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 5:75-101. Vigorous application of comparative ethnographic evidence to the text of a collection shaped by Child’s text-bound criteria.

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From villainous to virtuous: xerxes through the lens of handel’s ombra mai fu, about greek goddesses as mothers or would-be mothers, on the idea of dead poets as imagined by t. s. eliot, compared with ideas about reperformance, part ii.

Financial Literacy and Financial Well-being

27 Pages Posted:

David Puelz

University of Texas at Austin - McCombs School of Business; University of Chicago - Booth School of Business

Robert Puelz

Southern Methodist University (SMU) - SMU Cox School of Business

Myeongrok Doh

New York University (NYU) - Department of Finance

Date Written: August 05, 2024

We investigate the effect of financial literacy on a widely used measure of financial well-being while controlling for socioeconomic and behavioral factors. We analyze the survey data from the 2018 and 2021 National Financial Capability Study (NFCS) by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). Our analysis employs three models to estimate the causal effect of financial literacy on financial well-being: a multiple linear regression model, a two-stage model using regularized Bayesian linear regression, and a two-stage model using Bayesian Causal Forests to study treatment effect heterogeneity. We find a surprising result: the treatment effect of financial literacy on well-being is negative, significant, and robust across all three models. This finding holds implications for financial education policymakers and consumer scientists whose work focuses on financial literacy, financial well-being, and overall well-being. By revealing diverse treatment effects across various subgroups, our study identifies demographic groups more susceptible to the adverse impact of financial literacy on financial well-being. Consequently, tailored strategies will better allocate financial education away from those penalized by good intentions.

Keywords: Financial literacy, Financial well-being, Regularization, Bayesian, Causal inference, Regression trees

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

David Puelz (Contact Author)

University of texas at austin - mccombs school of business ( email ).

Austin, TX 78712 United States

University of Chicago - Booth School of Business ( email )

5807 S. Woodlawn Avenue Chicago, IL 60637 United States

Southern Methodist University (SMU) - SMU Cox School of Business ( email )

New york university (nyu) - department of finance ( email ).

Stern School of Business 44 West 4th Street New York, NY 10012-1126 United States

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