Learning to be literate

Abstract

Among the defining features of an advanced modern society is widespread literacy in a print medium. And yet human beings invented writing systems only about 5,500 years ago, well after the human mind had fully evolved, suggesting that the human cognitive architecture could not have evolved specifically to enable reading and writing. Instead, the ability to read and write is based on general cognitive abilities that evolved to satisfy other purposes. For this reason, studies of literacy learning have general implications for all studies of cognition and learning. In this chapter, we review the large body of learning sciences research that examines the fundamental cognitive and social processes whereby people learn to read and write. We conclude by identifying several general implications for learning scientists. The word literacy evolved from the Latin term litteratus, which means "being marked with letters." Thus a "literate person" is a person who can read and write text using letters. More recently, a broader and more expansive notion of a literate performance has been applied to fields and areas traditionally not focused solely on printed verbal texts: Information literacy, media literacy (or mediacy), multimedia literacy, technological literacy, functional literacy, critical literacy, rhetorical literacy, arts literacy, ecological literacy, health literacy, statistical literacy, emotional literacy, computer literacy (or cyberacy), science literacy, mathematical literacy (or numeracy), visual literacy, digital literacy, infomedia literacy, moral literacy, dance literacy, ancient literacy, and countless other notions that refer to one’s capabilities within a specific area (Tuominen, Savolainen, & Talja, 2005). This more expansive conception of literacy further posits the need for intermediality, the synthesis of various literacies needed to navigate the complex 21st-century world (Elleström, 2010).