literacy

This page considers literacy in relation to readability.

There is a broader historical examination elsewhere on this site. Questions about 'digital literacy' - finding and evaluating electronic content - are noted here.

     introduction

The major research findings are that -

• Measures of literacy correlate closely with measures of intelligence and aptitude.
• Measures of literacy correlate closely with the breadth of the individual's knowledge.
• Measures of literacy correlate closely to job performance.
• Workplace literacy programs are highly effective in producing, in a brief period, significant improvements in job-related reading.

     studies 

Among writing on literacy and development we recommend Carlo Cipolla's classic Literacy & Development in the West (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1969), the revisionist The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 2001) by Jonathan Rose and Jack Goody's The Interface Between the Oral & the Written (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1987). There is another historical perspective in Literacy & Power in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1994) edited by Alan Bowman.

Goody'sThe Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1977), David Olson's The World on Paper (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1994), Ruth Finnegan's Literacy & Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication (Oxford: Blackwell 1988) and Gunther Kress' Literacy in the New Media Age (London: Routledge 2003) are suggestive.

Recent nation by nation figures on literacy are supplied as part of the Digital Divides profile elsewhere on this site.
  





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