What is Literacy?

What a tricky question! Answering this question with any degree of specificity is to embark on a very slippery slope indeed. Literacy has had different meanings from one time to the next. It is transient and malleable. Just think about all of the different ways that the word literacy can be used. When we say someone cannot read we call them illiterate. When someone is computer savvy we say they are computer literate. We talk about cultural literacy and personal literacy, and in each of these instances the term literacy means something different. In a broad sense I would describe literacy as one's ability to make and communicate meaning.

Someone who is "illiterate" in the traditional sense (meaning that they cannot read or write) may be very culturally literate. Kathleen Yancey's article "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key" highlights the changing nature of literacy. How literacy is defined is changing with the dawn of new technologies. Being literate can no longer be defined as one's ability to understand the written word, because there are so many types of literacy. Our definition of literacy can no longer be confined to mean someone who possesses one particular set of skills.

If literacy is one's ability to make and communicate meaning, what does this mean for our technologically advanced society? In future generations will illiterate refer to people who cannot communicate using technology? Our ability to master new modes of communication may be the key to literacy in the future, or perhaps that time has already come. Yancey gives us something to think about when she says "changes to literacy are limited not by technology but rather by our ability to adapt and acquire the new literacies that emerge" (Yancey, 816).

Yancey, K (2011). Writing as a mode of learning. In V. Villnueva & K. Arola (Eds.), Cross-talk in Comp Theory (pp. 791-826). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.