Reading and Other Forms of Literacy: Implications for Teaching and Learning

Critics have suggested that crash educational rehabilitation programs operating in the United States should borrow a page from Third World literacy campaigns whose efforts to bring large numbers of nonreading persons into the literate population have been reported highly effective. The implicit challenge is this: If such efforts work for technologically underdeveloped countries, why not try them on the underdeveloped populations in technologically advanced societies? Heavy investment has been made in basic reading and other content-area instruction as a response to the widespread problem of educational underdevelopment and illiteracy in many inner-city American schools. Despite these efforts, America does not seem to be able to duplicate the kinds of successes reported from the Third World. Why? One of the most obvious answers to this question lies in the ways literacy has been defined. Our own casual observation in some Central American countries and in the Caribbean suggests that, in those settings, literacy refers to mastery of very elementary skills such as decoding, word recognition, and signal reading. The literacy attainment goal of such programs is comparable to thirdor fourth-grade level reading competency in a country like the United States. A second possible explanation compares the level and nature of the effort directed at the problem. In many Third World programs, even though the quality of reading instruction is believed to vary considerably, the ethos and enthusiasm of students and teachers alike reportedly is quite high. In most cases, Third World literacy campaigns have the endorsement of their national governments and literacy attainment is coupled with nationalist pride. Such a supportive political climate stands in stark contrast to the low degree of expectation, the heightened sense of alienation between participants and target populations, and the lack of enthusiasm that plague many basic literacy programs in America. Indeed, if Third World literacy programs are effective it may be because (1) their literacy goals are not high and (2) the context in which they are implemented is unusually supportive. However, a more complex problem exists. In a world dominated by advanced technology which functions on the basis of complex abstract concepts and numeric relationships, basic literacy, while important, is