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chapter 6 - Coggle Diagram
chapter 6
Child and adult literacies
Children begin to form nascent theories about what literacy is, how it’s done and the purposes it serves, they develop literacy as they do oracy.
Children encounter three fundamental problems:
What is the difference between drawing and writing?
How does writing relate to oral language?
What are the conventions required to communicate in different genres, contexts, etc.?
What the untrained adult eye sees as scribbling or rows of figures which look like dots and sticks is actually a representation of the beginning of a child’s ‘thinking’ about written language.
Ken Goodman and Noam Chomsky said that the reader’s objective is to construct meaning from the text.
The advantage that adult readers have over children is that they have more fully formed grammars and a larger lexicon; thus, they are generally quicker at processing information in written form.
Writing systems and culture
The origins of written language suggests that it appeared separately in three regions of the world:
Sumer (present-day Iraq) about 5,500 years ago;
China about 3,300 years ago.
Mesoamerica (the region from central Mexico to Nicaragua) about 2,600 years ago.
There are codices with its own writing system, one specifically found out in Puebla, Mexico, is a divinatory calendar book to select dates to engage in certain action; that complex written text can be produces by societies that did not possess an alphabet, the Mesoamerican codices exemplify writing that suited the purposes of users in a specific time and place.
Literacy is best understood as an open, rather than a closed, set of practices; the ability to read and write has come to be regarded as an essential indicator of both ‘civilization’ and individual development.
The expanding scope of literacy
Written language hasn’t always been a central concern for linguists; however, views of written language have changed as the field has moved from modality-dominant views of language to the notion of an underlying language competence which we can externalize through four channels (speech, sign, writing and Braille).
Such areas as discourse analysis, language planning, bilingual education, additional language education, translation, lexicography, among others, are now likely to include an explicit focus on the written aspects of language.
Literacy and individuals
The idea that literacy is capable of transforming individual lives also has a long history. Plato argued that writing fundamentally
altered the way the pupil approached learning because he thought that individuals will give up with memorize from the inside and will depend on writing.
Walter Ong thought that writing has changed human consciousness because of the way we think got a different structure with the writing since it helps us to composing our thoughts
Academic achievement and the measurement of literacy
People’s view of ‘what counts’ as reading and writing will depend on the literacy practices and forms they learned at school and folk beliefs about the act of reading; but as we’ve seen, school practices have not always been especially effective, and proficient adult readers don’t actually read like they are popularly thought to.
Literacy is increasingly assessed on the basis of the learner’s ability to sound and name the letters of the alphabet; identify syllables in words; recognize that the same sounds may have different spellings and that the same spellings may relate to different words; write each letter of the alphabet, hear, identify, segment, and blend phonemes in words; use their knowledge of the sound symbol relationships and phonological patterns.