WA1

Literacy!

Literacy is all around us. The question concerning it is what literacy really is. One definition given by John Szwed is that literacy is “the capacity to read and write” (Adkins 1) which nowadays plays a big role in earning a living, achieving personal enlightenment and enjoyment as well as maintaining a stable and democratic society and in history helped in the rise of civilization. It also means to have competence or knowledge in a defined area which does not have to be a tied to reading and writing words but can also be something else. He adds that literacy is a necessity in education and modernity.  As it is said, “The idea of knowledge and competence is often part of our lives about literacy. What you are competent in is what you are literate in.”. This describes perfectly what is considered as literacy.

In addition there seems to be the question of how much literacy really relates to civilization and also that we still do not know what “literacy” is really about (Adkins 1,2). All this is founded on reading in today’s society. In the United States of America there is a severe decrease in the reading of novels and even worse in the reading of plays and poetry, which is at zero percent. Nowadays the genre that English classes in the United States are focused on is fiction, drama and poetry. (Adkins 4)

In contrast to Szwed, Barton and Hamilton have a theory that arranges literacy in two different types. There are literacy practices and literacy events, which help you, observe literacy in its “national habitat”.

            You have to understand what is counted as an event and what as a practice. A literacy event is an activity where literacy has a role which means there is usually “a written text, or texts, central to the activity and there may be talk around the text” whereas literacy events are “observable episodes which arise from practices and are shaped by them”. These literacy events occur mostly regularly and can be used as a starting point of research on literacy (Adkins 23). This shows that a lot of things count while talking about literacy.

In order to understand the literacy of and culture certain different groups of people surrounding us, you have to conduct research within them. Not only do you have to talk to the group of people but you also you have to study all their behavior and the way they interact. A research like this is called ethnographic research and is conducted by so-called ethnographers.

The research papers coming from this are called ethnography. Ethnography is one of the two things that make up culture. The study is the written down version that sums up the fieldwork the researchers did. This getting to know the group and their ways is called fieldwork (Sunstein, Chiseri-Strater 4).

The fieldwork consists of living, observing and describing life, behaviors and language of the certain group of people for an extended time period. The ethnographic researchers do that fieldwork in an attempt to understand cultures and by observing learn the patterns of the others. This also helps them to understand their own cultures better as they see how other groups work. Ethnography helps people who did not conduct the research understand the cultures. Many people like anthropologists, linguistics, sociologists, folklorists and a lot of other groups use the ethnographer’s techniques to conduct their own researches in their fields of study (Sunstein, Chiseri-Strater 3,4).

Knowing now that not only things connected to reading and writing are considered literacy I can now observe the world in a different way. Even if a person might not be able to read and write as good as another one does not mean that somebody is illiterate but that their strength might just lie in a different field of interest which I might not know that much about because I have different interests and education.

 

Works Cited

Adkins, Tabetha. Ethnographic Inquiries In Writing. Southlake, Texas: Fontainehead, 2010. Print.

Sunstein, Bonnie Stone and Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater. FieldWorking: Reading and Writing. 4^th Edition. Boston, MA: Belforn/St. Martin’s. 2012. Print.

Class material