Literacy Essay -- Education Learning Papers

LiteracyWhy is literacy of much(prenominal) interest to postsecondary teachers of writing? If literacy, as it might be defined by someone outside the field of English studies, is the aptitude to read and write, therefore why are we interested in it when our own students presumably acquired this strength in the distant past, about the time they learned to tie bows in shoelaces? That we are interested in literacy, I take it, is obvious from the proliferation of books with the watchword in their titles, of conferences on topics in literacy (the Modern Language Association has right off held two), and of review essays such as this one, commissioned by the editors of a journal that purports to deal in issues relevant to part theory and advanced composition at the college level.Defining LiteracyI might answer my opening question by redefining literacy from within English studies in such a carriage as to make it more complex and problematic, and thus to question the confidence tha t college students have already acquired it. Indeed, in these proliferating discussions of literacy, its simple definition as the ability to read and write is usually rejected at the outset. But in attempting to go beyond the simple definition, scholars begin to diverge. Consider, for example, the variety of essays discovered chthonian the title, The Right to Literacy (1990), a title which implies a unitary conception of literacy and a contest only over who possesses the desired object. In this volume, Andrea A. Lunsford, Helene Moglen, and James Slevin collect twenty-nine papers from the 1988 MLA Right to Literacy conference. Most of the essays, therefore, are short and ranging through and through them, one gets a sense of the heterogeneous mixture of topics that accrue for Engli... ...Discourse Community. course of instruction Inquiry 12 (1982) 191-207.---. Literacy in Culture and Cognition. A Sourcebook for Basic create verbally Teachers. Ed. Theresa Enos. New York Random, 1 987. 125-37.Brandt, Deborah. Literacy as Involvement The Acts of Writers, Readers, and Texts. Carbondale Confederate Illinois UP, 1990.Hirsch, E.D., Jr. Cultural Literacy What every(prenominal) American Needs to Know. 2nd ed. New York Vintage, 1988.Kintgen, Eugene R., Barry M. Kroll, and Mike Rose, eds. Perspectives on Literacy. Carbondale Southern Illinois UP, 1988.Lunsford, Andrea A., Helene Moglen, and James Slevin, eds. The Right to Literacy. New York MLA, 1990.Stuckey, J. Elspeth. The Violence of Literacy. Portsmouth, NH Boynton, 1991.Taylor, Denny, and Catherine Dorsey-Gaines. Growing Up literate Learning from Inner-City Families. Portsmouth, NH Heinemann, 1988.