LITERACY

emergent literacy
emilia ferreiro

intertextuality
david m. bloome
susan r. goldman

learning from multimedia sources
jennifer wiley
joshua a. hemmerich

multimedia literacy
david reinking

narrative comprehension and production
rolf a. zwaan
katinka dijkstra

vocabulary and vocabulary learning
margaret g. mckeown
isabel l. beck

writing and composition
carol n. dixon
christopher johnston

EMERGENT LITERACY

William Teale and Elizabeth Sulzby coined the term emergent literacy in 1986 from Mary Clay's dissertation title, "Emergent Reading Behavior" (1966). Their term designated new conceptions about the relationship between a growing child and literacy information from the environment and home literacy practices. The process of becoming literate starts before school intervention.

Important changes took place around 1975 to 1985 in the way researchers approached young children's attempts at reading and writing, which were influenced by previous language acquisition studies of children actively engaged in learning oral language.

In English-speaking countries, literacy acquisition was traditionally focused on acquisition of reading. Writing was considered an activity undertaken after reading. Carol Chomsky's 1971 article "Write Now, Read Later" was for this reason provocative. It is worth noting that these two opposite views (reading before writing or writing before reading) are alien to other cultural traditions. For instance, in the Spanish school tradition both activities have been traditionally considered as complementary.

Teale and Suzby maintained that "in the schools, the reading readiness program and the notion of the need to teach prerequisites for reading became fixed. Furthermore, using reading readiness programs in the kindergarten literacy curriculum became a widespread practice. The reading readiness program which became so firmly entrenched during the 1960s remains extremely prevalent in the 1980s"(p. xiii).

The concept of emergent literacy was intended to indicate a clear opposition with the then prevailing notion of "reading readiness." This new concept arises from changes in the research paradigm, mainly in developmental psycholinguistics, and not in the practical educational field.

The Original Meaning of the Concept

Several pioneering researchers (among them Clay in New Zealand, Yetta Goodman and Sulzby in the United States, and Emilia Ferreiro in Latin American countries) share several main ideas that can be summarized as follows:

1. Before schooling, a considerable amount of literacy learning takes place, provided that children are growing in literate environments (homes where reading and writing are part of daily activies; urban environments where writing is everywhere–in the street, in the markets, on all kinds of food containers or toys–as well as on specific objects like journals, books, and calendars).
2. Through their encounters with print and their participation in several kinds of literacy events, children try to make sense of environmental print. Indeed, they elaborate concepts about the nature and function of these written marks.
3. Children try to interpret environmental print. They also try to produce written marks. Their attempts constitute the early steps of reading and writing. Thus, reading and writing activities go hand in hand, contributing to literacy development as comprehension and production both contribute to oral language acquisition. The use of the term literacy in the phrase emergent literacy indicates that the acquisition of reading and writing take place simultaneously.
4. The pioneer authors of the emergent literacy approach avoid the use of terms like pretend reading or pre-reading, pretend writing or pre-writing. Such terms, in fact, establish a frontier in the developmental process instead of a developmental continuum.
5. From a careful observation of spontaneous writing and reading activities as well as from data obtained through some elicitation techniques, it becomes possible to infer how children conceive the writing system and the social meaning of the activities related to it.
6. Emergent literacy is a child-centered concept that not only takes into account relevant experiences (like sharing reading books in family settings), but also takes into consideration that children are always trying to make sense of the information received in a developmental pathway that is characterized both by some milestones common to all and by individual stories.

Transformations of the Original Meaning

What is the use of the expression emergent literacy fifteen years after its first introduction into the literature? This expression competes with others such as beginning literacy, early literacy, or even preschool literacy. It is not unusual to see alternative terms used by the same authors (for instance Dorothy Strickland and Lesley Morrow). The term emergent remains restricted to English users. It is not used in Spanish nor in Italian or French, where expressions like "éveil au monde de l'écrit" ("awakening to the world of writing") convey similar ideas.

The emergent literacy approach affects preschool settings and shapes new educational practices. Instead of exercises to train basic skills as a prerequisite to reading, researchers frequently observe teachers and children engaged in real reading activities. Instead of exercises of copying letter forms, teachers encourage children to produce pieces of writing.

Independent research conducted in the linguistic and historical fields by such people as David Olson, Florian Coulmas, and Geoffrey Sampson contributed, during the closing decades of the twentieth century, to a reconsideration of writing systems. As long as alphabetical writing systems (AWS) are being conceived as visual marks for elementary units already done (i.e., the phonemes), the task of the child is reduced to the learning of a code of correspondences. But AWS are highly complex because they are the result of a long history, in which phonic considerations interfere with historical, pragmatic, and even aesthetic considerations.

However, the old pedagogical ideas are still so strong that the term emergent literacy has begun to be used as a new component of old practices. Expressions such as to teach beginning literacy, evaluation of emergent literacy skills, and even emergent literacy teachers are a commonplace in books, articles, and papers devoted to teachers, parents, and decision-makers. It is clear that emergent literacy cannot be taught, even if it can be improved or stimulated. The reduction of this concept to a set of trainable skills goes against the term's original meaning.

In the meantime, "phonological awareness" began to be considered the single strong predictor of school reading skills (reading, in that case, is evaluated in tasks of letter-sound correspondences in front of lists of words and pseudo-words). Some authors started to look for the components of emergent literacy–a set of skills–to allow similar assessment as phonological awareness.

When emergent literacy skills include phonological awareness it is clear that the new label is being applied to old ideas: emergent literacy originally indicated concepts built up by children through many encounters with print other than explicit teaching, whereas phonological awareness is clearly an acquisition that does not develop without explicit intervention, even if it is closely related to the acquisition of an AWS. For instance, when parents engage in shared reading, they offer the child the opportunity to learn about many relevant aspects of books but they are not explicitly teaching a particular literacy component.

This shaping of new ideas into old paradigms is present also in psychological research, such as the 1998 publication by Grover Whitehurst and Christopher Lonigan. It could seem, at first glance, entirely justified to inquire about the components of early literacy, and the weight of each one of them as predictors of school achievements in reading. However, the identification of these components and the assessment of their individual weight shows that literacy continues to be conceived mainly as reading behavior and that written language is still conceived as a coding of already given elementary units (the phonemes) into a graphic form (the letters of an alphabet). The persistent confusion between the teaching activities and learning processes (i.e., how children contribute to the task, how they transform the available information through their own assimilatory processes) is at the core of the weak results that try to discover the relevant correlations between early literacy and future school achievements.

Policy

For the time being, the best recommendation for any preschool program is to offer children many opportunities to engage in real reading and writing activities, with the grounded conviction that children–who are intelligent human beings–are eager to learn and will take advantage of a stimulating environment. The old view that prevented children from sharing literacy learning opportunities until they were ready to learn lessons is a discriminatory one, as not all parents all over the world are able to provide literacy experiences.

See also: Early Childhood Education; Literacy and Reading; Reading, subentry on Beginning Reading.

bibliography

Chomsky, Carol. 1971. "Write Now, Read Later." Childhood Education 47:296–299.

Clay, Mary. 1966. "Emergent Reading Behaviour." Ph.D. diss., University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Coulmas, Florian. 1989. The Writing Systems of the World. Oxford and Cambridge, Eng.: Blackwell.

Ferreiro, Emilia, and Teberosky, Ana. 1983. Literacy Before Schooling. Exeter, NH and London: Heinemann.

Goodman, Yeta. 1986. "Children Coming to Know Literacy." In Emergent Literacy: Writing and Reading, ed. William Teale and Elizabeth Sulzby. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Olson, David. 1994. The World on Paper. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

Sampson, Geoffrey. 1985. Writing Systems. London: Hutchinson.

Snow, Catherine, and Ninio, Anat. 1986. "The Contracts of Literacy: What Children Learn from Learning to Read Books." In Emergent Literacy: Writing and Reading, ed. William Teale and Elizabeth Sulzby. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Strickland, Dorothy, and Morrow, Lesley M., eds. 1989. Emerging Literacy: Young Children Learn to Read and Write. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Strickland, Dorothy, and Morrow, Lesley M., eds. 2000. Beginning Reading and Writing. Newark, DE: International Reading Association and New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University.

Teale, William, and Sulzby, Elizabeth, eds. 1986. Emergent Literacy: Writing and Reading. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Witehurst, Grover, and Lonigan, Christopher. 1998. "Child Development and Emergent Literacy." Child Development 69 (3):848–872.

Emilia Ferreiro

INTERTEXTUALITY

A teacher asks students to find ways in which the stories "The Emperor's New Clothes" and "Chicken Little" are similar and ways they are different. A member of a book club compares last month's selection to the current month's. A book review includes some of the dialogue from the reviewed book. People leaving the movie theater after seeing Lord of the Rings comment that the book was better. The movie Pocahontas is criticized by historians for misrepresenting established historical events. In each of these examples, different texts are brought together, related to one another, or connected in some way. This juxtaposition of different texts is called intertextuality. Intertextuality occurs at many levels, in many forms, and serves a variety of functions; the foregoing examples reflect only a small subset of the possibilities.

Levels, Forms, and Functions of Intertextuality

Juxtapositions may occur at multiple levels including word or phrase, sentence or utterance, larger units of connected text such as a paragraph or stanza, and genre. Intertextuality can be created through the following means:

• duplication (a string of words occurring in two texts such as occurs in quotation) and stylistic means (repetition of a stress, sound, or rhyme pattern across two or more texts)
• naming and reference (as occurs in citations)
• proximal association (as occurs among chapters in an edited book which are presumed to have some relationship to each other)
• sequential association (an established sequence of related texts such as a reply to a letter or e-mail).

Intertextuality can be explicit or implied through a variety of literary devices (e.g., allusion, metonymy, synecdoche).

Intertextuality can be viewed as a function of social practices associated with the use of language. It is a social practice of scholars to refer to previous scholarly works through the use of quotations, citations, and bibliographies. The reading and use of book reviews, movie reviews, and similar texts can be viewed as social practices, which by definition are overt intertextual practices. Intertextuality can be created when an unexpected text occurs within a social practice. For example, if instead of receiving a report card at the end of a grading period, a student received a poem, part of the meaning of the poem would be from its placement in a particular social practice and its contrast with the genre of report card.

Locations of Intertextuality

A key question to ask about intertextuality is its location, because questions about location reveal different definitions and approaches to the analysis of intertextuality. Some scholars locate intertextuality in the text itself when explicit or implied reference is made to another text. The intertextual relationship exists whether or not it is detected by the reader and whether or not it was intended by the author of the text. From this perspective questions can be asked about how one text signals another text and what meaning is conveyed by the text through the intertextual reference.

A second location of intertextuality is in the person. As a person interacts with the target text (whether spoken, written, or electronic), the person brings to the interaction with the text previous texts and his or her experience with them. Some of these previous texts may be conversations, books, or other printed texts, narratives of personal experience, memories, and so forth. The person may use these previous texts to create meanings for the target text or to help with the process of comprehending the text. For example, previous experience in reading a mathematics text provides guidance and procedures for reading a new mathematics text. Because, for example, individuals have different background experiences and histories of encounters with conversational and written texts, the texts a particular person might bring to any interaction with a target text would vary. So too would their use of those texts. Other questions of interest pertain to understanding the cognitive processes involved in using texts from previous experiences.

Closely related to locating intertextuality in the person is locating intertextuality in the task. For example, an academic task might require a person to interact with multiple texts in order to understand some phenomenon, such as a historical event. In such a case, the task explicitly requires the use and juxtaposition of multiple texts. In some cases, multiple texts may even be provided as part of the presentation of the task. However, it may also be the case that the person addressing the task conceives of the task as involving multiple texts, whether or not it is an explicit part of the task. For example, a student given a literary text to explicate may conceive of the task as involving the juxtaposition of the target text, other texts written by the author, the teacher's lectures on the target text, and his or her previous efforts at explicating literary texts with the resultant teacher comments and grades. From this perspective, questions of interest concern the explicit and implicit intertextual demands made by the task and the interpretation of those demands. Interpretation reflects the person's representation of the task and its intertextual demands and are manifest in what and how texts are used to address the task. Questions can also be asked about the cognitive processes involved in the representation of the task and in its completion. There are interesting questions about the cognitive, affective, and social dimensions of the task, including their role in task interpretation and execution.

A fourth location of intertextuality is in the social practices of a community or social group. Over time, a social group establishes shared standards and expectations for what texts can and should be juxtaposed, and under what circumstances. That is, there are shared, abstract models for the use and juxtaposition of texts in particular types of situations. For example, in a court room, it is a shared social practice of lawyers and judges to interpret testimony and evidence in terms of previous court cases and a specific sets of legal documents (such as the U.S. Constitution). Within an academic discipline, there are specific intertextual practices and these vary from discipline to discipline. For example, in scholarly publications in the social sciences it is customary to cite previous work on the topic of interest. In writing a novel, however, authors do not cite previous novels that have addressed similar themes. In classrooms, teachers and students establish shared intertextual practices for engaging in academic work. For example, there are shared intertextual practices for completing worksheets (e.g., using the text book to answer the worksheet questions), for studying for tests, for writing an essay, and so on.

Although individuals enact intertextual practices, what they are enacting is an abstract model that has evolved over time. As such, the material environment that people encounter may be structured to facilitate certain intertextual practices and inhibit others. For example, many scholastic literature texts are organized to facilitate genre study and the comparison of texts within a particular genre. They do not foster comparison of texts across genre (e.g., poems and short stories). Textbooks often have end-of-chapter questions that refer readers to material in that chapter, but which do not ask readers to use information from previous chapters. From the perspective of intertextuality as located in social practices of communities and groups, questions can be asked about the intertextual demands of the social practices that make up an institution such as schooling and how various intertextual practices came to be associated with particular social institutions.

A fifth location of intertextuality is in the social interaction of people in an event. As people interact with each other they propose intertextual links, acknowledge the proposals, recognize the intertextual links, and give the intertextual links meaning and social consequence. That is, intertextuality is socially constructed as people act and react to each other. In classroom conversations, a teacher may propose an intertextual link between a story the class is reading, a movie being shown at a local theater, and a mural in the surrounding community. But the proposed intertextuality does not become actualized until the students acknowledge that an intertextual link has been made, recognize the story, the movie, and the mural and the potential connections among them, and give meaning and consequence to those connections. As people interact with each other, the proposed intertextual link may be negotiated and transformed such that the construction of intertextuality is a joint accomplishment shared by all involved in the event. From this perspective, questions can be asked about the interpersonal processes involved in proposing, ratifying, and giving meaning and consequence to intertextuality.

The multiple locations of intertextuality reflect, in part, different disciplinary perspectives on intertextuality, as suggested by the kinds of questions proposed for each location. Cognitive perspectives tend to locate intertextuality either in the text, in the person, or in the task; social, anthropological, and related perspectives tend to locate intertextuality in social, cultural, and historical practices; perspectives associated with sociolinguistic ethnography and symbolic interactionism tend to locate intertextuality in the social interaction of people in an event. Regardless of perspective, intertextuality is inherent to every use of language whether written or spoken, verbal, or graphic. It is ubiquitous in education, in every classroom conversation, instructional task, curriculum guide, educational policy document, and debate. What may be less obvious about intertextuality is the impact it has on delimiting texts that may be juxtaposed as well as establishing participation roles, rights, and responsibilities for interacting with texts. This aspect of intertextuality can be discussed in terms of power relations.

Intertextuality and Power Relations

Two kinds of power relations associated with intertextuality can be distinguished for heuristic purposes. The first concerns the establishment of boundaries on the set of texts that may be intertextually related in any specific instance. Through historical practice, some authority, material circumstances, or simply the limitations of a person's experience, boundaries are placed on what texts may be candidates for juxtaposition. For example, consider the set of texts that may be considered for a high school course on American literature. It is unlikely that folk songs, rap music, personal journals of ordinary people, or comic books would be considered as possible candidates–much less be included in the course. By establishing particular boundaries some texts and the ideas, people, places, and ideologies they represent are centralized, others are marginalized. However, these boundaries can be crossed; indeed, the Norton Anthology of African American Literature includes folk songs, rap music, and a compact disc of oral performances, and the Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature includes a comic-book-like entry.

The second kind of power relations related to intertextuality concerns intertextual participation rights–who gets to make what intertextual links, when, where, how, and to what social consequence. Intertextual rights are not necessarily distributed equally or equitably. Consider a classroom example. A low-achieving student might propose an intertextual link between a novel being read in a class and a rap song. The teacher might dismiss the proposed intertextual link simply because the low-achieving student proposed it. A high-achieving student might make a similar intertextual proposal that is accepted by the teacher and other students. Precisely because intertextuality is ubiquitous in academic and social practices, severely circumscribed and differentially distributed participation rights have important consequences for individuals, the institutions within which they may operate, and the ways in which they operate within those institutions.

The Educational Significance of Intertextuality

In many ways, teachers and researchers have been using the construct of intertextuality without naming it. Teachers often ask students to relate one text to another, and researchers are often interested in how various conversations and written texts have been juxtaposed. Thus, the explicit naming of intertextual processes and attention to them can be seen as an attempt to create systematic inquiry about intertextuality and to build an understanding of its nuances and consequences.

Recognition of the ubiquitous nature of intertextuality provides educational researchers with a set of heuristics for analysis of classroom conversations, reading processes, writing processes, instructional practices, and assessment practices. Similarly, attention to intertextuality can lead to redesign of curriculum in reading, language arts, literature studies, and social studies. Emphasis can be placed on ways to create understanding and meaning through intertextuality rather than the current emphasis on understanding texts as if they stood alone. There is preliminary evidence to suggest that such an emphasis increases academic achievement, although such increases are probably related to the ways in which texts are juxtaposed rather than simply juxtaposition. Attention to intertextuality also provides ways to enhance connections between academic texts and texts outside of the classroom, including community texts, workplace texts, and family texts.

See also: Literacy, subentries on Learning from Multimedia Sources, Multimedia Literacy; Reading, subentry on Learning from Text.

bibliography

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. "Discourse in the Novel" (1935). In The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Beach, Richard, and Anson, Chris. 1992. "Stance and Intertextuality in Written Discourse." Linguistics and Education 4:335–358.

Bloome, David, and Egan-Robertson, Ann. 1993. "The Social Construction of Intertextuality and Classroom Reading and Writing." Reading Research Quarterly 28:303–333.

Chametzky, Jules; Felstiner, John; Flanzbaum, Hilene; and Hellerstein, Kathryn. 2001. Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology. New York: Norton.

Gates, Henry Louis, and McKay, Nellie Y. 1997. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: Norton.

Hartman, Doulas. 1992. "Intertextuality and Reading: The Text, the Author, and the Context." Linguistics and Education 4:295–312.

Kamberelis, George, and Scott, Karla. 1992. "Other People's Voices: The Co-Articulation of Texts and Subjectivities." Linguistics and Education 4:359–404.

Lemke, Jay. 1992. "Intertextuality and Educational Research." Linguistics and Education 4:257–268.

Rowe, Deborah. 1994. Preschoolers as Authors: Literacy Learning in the Social World of the Classroom. Cresskil, NJ: Hampton.

Short, Kathy. 1992. "Researching Intertextuality within Collaborative Classroom Learning Environments." Linguistics and Education 4:313–334.

David M. Bloome

Susan R. Goldman

LEARNING FROM MULTIMEDIA SOURCES

The predominant means of instruction has traditionally been through verbal medium, either as spoken lecture or written text. As more instructional resources of many different media types become available to students through the Internet, there is a need for educators to understand when these sources may be used effectively for instruction, as well as a need for students to develop an additional set of literacy skills in order to learn from these sources. Although there is much optimism that multimedia sources will be a great tool for instruction, research in cognitive science has demonstrated that the use of these resources does not always lead to better learning. It is important to recognize the potential cognitive implications of multimedia presentations, including text, graphics, video, audio, and virtual reality simulations. Multimedia has been incorporated into instructional materials in a variety of ways: decoration, illustration, explanatory simulation, and "situating" simulation. The first three uses may be best thought of as adjuncts to a verbal lesson, while in the final use, the entire "lesson" is embedded and conveyed by situating the learner in a virtual context.

Uses

Often multimedia is used to decorate text, with the goal of making the text more interesting for the reader. A second use for multimedia, illustration or description, can be used to help a reader visualize a place or time or object. A third use of multimedia involves the explanation or explication of concepts. Especially in complex domains, understanding often requires that learners develop a dynamic mental model of phenomena or processes. Multimedia animations, narrations, and diagrams have all been used to support the understanding of complex subject matter by illustrating or highlighting important relations, thereby attempting to convey a correct mental model directly to the student.

Improved Learning

One reason why multimedia might be expected to lead to improved learning is consistent with a constructivist approach that posits that conditions that make knowledge acquisition more self-directed and active are beneficial for student understanding. The presentation of loosely connected texts and images in hypermedia environments allow learners to navigate information with more flexibility. At the same time, in order to build coherence, students must construct their own elaborations, inferences, and explanations. Thus, there has been reason for optimism surrounding the benefits of learning from hypermedia.

Another reason one might expect benefits from illustrated text and multimedia presentation in general is that it allows for information to be represented in multiple ways (i.e., both verbal and visual). A great deal of previous research within cognitive psychology, such as that of Allan Paivio in 1986, has suggested that the more codes one has for a given memory, the more likely one is to remember that information. Multiple media may also make the learning experience more vivid or distinctive. And, given the different preferences of different learners, multimedia may allow learners to choose the code best suited to their abilities.

A related reason why multimedia, and graphics in particular, may improve learning is that some particular domains may lend themselves to visual presentation, such as when information is inherently spatial. For instance, learning about different ecologies and climate zones may benefit greatly from the presentation of a map. Further, even when the understanding of the subject matter does not require a visual representation, images can still facilitate understanding if the image provides the basis for an abstract model of the content of the text. Figures, graphs, or flow charts that may allow the reader to think about abstract concepts and relations through images support the creation of more complete mental models and as a consequence may improve comprehension of text. Also, when subject matter is as complex and dynamic as streams of data from weather satellites or space stations, then visuals and animations may be especially important. Similarly, visual or audio representations (sonitizations) of complex data can give human thinkers the ability to consider many more dimensions, and the salient relationships between those dimensions, than they might otherwise.

Finally, it should not be overlooked that instructional materials with visual or audio adjuncts are simply more interesting to readers than plain text. Such motivational issues may contribute to advantages in learning with any multimedia presentation.

Criticisms

With all these potential benefits of images, it is perhaps surprising that since the 1960s, the empirical results on learning from illustrated text have been less than positive. In a 1970 review of studies using illustrated texts, Spencer Jay Samuels found little support for the superiority of illustrated text over plain text. In fact, in some cases illustration leads to poorer learning than simple text presentation. Follow-up investigations suggest that one reason for the lack of a consistent positive effect of images on learning is that any learning effect depends greatly on the kind of image that is used. In a 1987 review of Joel Levin and colleagues that discriminated between decorative illustrations, and conceptually-relevant images, decorative illustrations were found to lead to the smallest improvements and sometimes negative effects in learning. Decorative illustrations are often not relevant for the concepts that are described by the text, yet they are still interesting for the reader, and will attract the reader's attention. For this reason, interesting but irrelevant illustrations can be seen as part of a larger class termed seductive details as coined by Ruth Garner and colleagues, and others. Similarly, color, sound effects, and motion are preattentive cues that necessarily attract a reader's focus. If they are not used to emphasize conceptually important information, they too can seduce the reader.

Even when images are relevant for understanding the target concept, there is a further danger that images or animations can make learners overestimate their level of comprehension. People tend to feel that a short glimpse of an image is generally sufficient for understanding. This can lead to an illusion that they understand a graphic or image, even when they have not really engaged in deeper thought about the information. Further, students are notoriously bad at comprehending complex graphics, especially data-related charts or figures, and will interpret the data in support of their own ideas.

Another danger with images and especially animations, is that they can provide so much information so easily that although the reader is able to grasp a basic idea of "how" a dynamic system works, a good understanding of "why" the system works the way it does is lacking (i.e., they are unable to recreate the system or apply their knowledge to a new instance). This effect has in fact been demonstrated in several studies. The research of Mary Hegarty and colleagues, and other research, indicated that still pictures, or still sequences of pictures, in which the reader needs to infer movement for themselves, led to better understanding of dynamic systems than animations that actually show the motions. Similarly, animations that are reproductions of real-world actions are more effective if they are "doctored" to emphasize important features of the display. And, animations that are stoppable and restartable under the learner's control may lead to better learning than real-time simulations. However, images that provide readers with the basis of a mental model, and animations that show the dynamics of a model, may be especially important for people who lack knowledge and spatial ability. Finally, even conceptually relevant adjuncts run the risk of distracting the learner, and they need to be presented in a way that does not compete with the processing of the text. A number of studies, such as the work of Wolfgang Schnotz and Harriet Grzondziel, have shown that students learn better from diagrams and animated graphics when they were presented separately from text. Alternatively, learning from multimedia has been supported by structured computer learning environments, where different media and sources are presented to students, but students are given instruction both in how to use the environment, and are given a specific learning goal.

Other multimedia adjuncts have been studied, most notably narrations and sound effects. The bottom line from these investigations is that narrations only benefit learning when they are nonredundant with text. However, narrations may be especially helpful for poorer readers, especially when they accompany diagrams, and highlight the conceptually important features. Sound effects and music in general are distracting, and as adjuncts to text, they do not contribute to better conceptual learning. They do however help simulated environments seem more authentic, and may be helpful for situated learning and anchored instruction. Realistic sound effects may be especially important in skill learning environments. Similarly, in terms of conceptual learning, animations may help only when readers cannot generate mental models on their own, although realistic video may help when learning a procedural task and also in "situating" contexts.

The Simulation of Reality

The final use of multimedia considered here is where multimedia is used, not as an adjunct to verbal instruction, but more extensively as the entire means of presentation. In these lines of application, multimedia is used to simulate reality, through video and audio streams, to produce a sense of learning "in context." This may be especially important in skill-training environments, when learning in an actual cockpit or surgical operating room would be unsafe and costly. In more academic domains, simulations can give students the feel of an authentic experience, and both situated learning and anchored learning approaches have attempted to capitalize on this advantage of multimedia presentation. Another application of multimedia simulation is the creation of artificial agents that can act as tutors or peers. The presence of an interactive human-like entity may be an especially important coaching tool, and multimedia simulation may make such tutoring experiences more effective than feedback or prompts that appear in text messages. Simulations may also be used to support distance education and collaboration, again by providing a sense of real "co-presence" to the users.

Virtual reality is the ultimate multimedia tool, combining realistic video and audio streams (i.e., three-dimensional), and sometimes even tactile experience. Here, the potential exists to convey an understanding of new concepts in ways that surpass real experience, and many have heralded virtual reality as a powerful educational tool. Most researchers refer to the multisensory-based sense of "presence" that virtual reality affords the user as the characteristic that separates it from other training approaches. Where procedural knowledge and visuo-spatial skills are concerned there seems to be support for this optimism. However, results on more academic subject matter understanding have been less convincing.

Most studies that have been performed on people's uses of virtual reality have included only self-report data that reflect the user's interpretation of her or his experience in the virtual environment, while fewer investigations include more direct measures of learning. Among the few virtual reality studies with learning measures, Chris Dede and colleagues examined in 1999 students' understanding of electromagnetic field concepts from a virtual environment called Maxwell World. Students in the virtual reality condition were better able to define concepts and demonstrate them in three-dimensional terms.

At the same time, pilot studies, such as those of Andrew Johnson and colleagues in 1999, on using virtual reality to promote understanding of astronomical physics concepts have found that the virtual reality environment can also be prone to seductive distractions. For example, to learn that the earth's shape is round, younger elementary school-age children engaged in a virtual reality game, which included traversing a spherical asteroid to gather objects. The students failed to exhibit a substantial and robust improvement in their understanding, presumably because of the distracting and nonrelevant aspects of the game.

It would seem that virtual reality would be a prime candidate to demonstrate the positive effects of multimedia sources on learning. Yet, virtual reality experiences are not easily translated into learning experiences, and the results of studies on the educational uses of virtual reality underscore the same principles as have been discussed above. Virtual reality may add value to educational contexts when real training is not possible, and where it goes beyond "realistic" experiences in ways that emphasize conceptual understanding.

As an Effective Strategy

As the nature of instructional materials changes to include more images, sounds, animations and simulations, it is important to recognize the conditions under which multimedia can be an effective learning tool, and that new literacy skills are needed to learn from those materials. Instead of being presented with a single message, multimedia learners are presented with many information sources on a topic, and those sources can represent a number of media. The sheer number of resources available through the Internet is enormous. The availability of so much information means that students have the ability to direct their own learning, by performing searches and selecting documents, evaluating sources of information, and allocating attention to images and animations, without being confined by the linear structure of a single text or lecture. Although this flexibility in the learning environment has been seen as an opportunity for more active student learning, it is clear that in order to learn from multimedia and electronic sources, students will likely need additional skills in searching, document evaluation, strategic reading, strategic understanding of graphics, and integrating information across sources, including the integration across text and graphics. A specific set of skills may also be necessary for learning in more immersive multimedia environments.

A recurrent question focuses on how multimedia helps learning. Some have suggested that positive effects due to multimedia may be simply due to the motivating effect of its novelty. Unfortunately the literature of the early twenty-first century contains few controlled studies and few tests of when multimedia helps understanding. Further research is needed to identify what conditions enable the best learning from multimedia, and what new literacy skills students will need to support that learning.

See also: Media and Learning; Literacy, subentry on Multimedia Literacy; Technology in Education.

bibliography

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Jennifer Wiley

Joshua A. Hemmerich

MULTIMEDIA LITERACY

The term multimedia is among several terms that have been associated with literacy to emphasize that literacy extends beyond reading and writing the alphabetic code, and should include a variety of audiovisual forms of representation. Associating multimedia with literacy also highlights a belief among many scholars and educators that conceptions of literacy and how it is developed should not focus exclusively on printed materials, but should include electronic media that have moved into the mainstream of communication, especially at the end of the twentieth century. Implicit in these views is that research and practice related to literacy must be transformed to accommodate new ways of accessing, processing, and using information.

Related Concepts

Kathleen T. Tyner argued in 1998 that in the information age the concept of literacy has been simultaneously broadened and splintered into many literacies in part because "the all purpose word literacy seems hopelessly anachronistic, tainted with the nostalgic ghost of a fleeting industrial age" (p. 62). Associating the term multimedia with literacy is consistent with that trend, although it might be thought of as encompassing a diverse set of related and sometimes ill-defined terms used in scholarly, and often popular, discourse. For example, related terms highlighting media and forms that go beyond the alphabetic code include media literacy, visual literacy, technological literacies, metamedia literacies, and representational literacy. Broader terms, such as the following, might also be included in this set because they typically acknowledge the role of diverse media and new technologies in broadening conceptions of literacy: multiliteracies, information literacies, critical literacy, and even the negatively stated term cultural illiteracy. Narrower terms such as computer literacy and neologisms such as numeracy also reflect expanding views of literacy, but such terms focus on specific skills and abilities.

Past and Present Conceptions

Broadening the scope of literacy, specifically in relation to diverse media, is not entirely a phenomenon of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Interest in how new media might affect conceptions of literacy can be traced to the widespread use of electronic audiovisual media such as television and film in the first half of the twentieth century. For example, Edgar Dale, well known among a earlier generation of educators and researchers for his work related to literacy, discussed the need for critical reading, listening, and observing in contending with the new literacies implied by audiovisual media of the 1940s.

Nonetheless, beginning in the latter decades of the twentieth century, the impetus for broadening the scope of literacy has been the increasing integration of digital technologies into the mainstream of everyday communication and the inherent capability of those technologies to blend diverse modes of representation. New modes of digital communication exist not only in parallel with conventional printed forms, but they have replaced or moved to the margins conventional forms of reading and writing. For example, the obsolescence of the typewriter, the ascendance of e-mail as the preferred alternative to diverse forms of correspondence on paper, the emergence of the Internet as a prominent cultural phenomenon, and the appearance of the electronic book represent a steady yet incomplete and unpredictable progression away from conventional printed forms. Likewise, students in the early twenty-first century routinely encounter digital information employing diverse audiovisual media presented in formats that are more interactive and dynamic than printed texts, although those encounters have been more likely to occur outside the school, as revealed in a national survey sponsored by Education Week in 2001.

Nonetheless, the opportunities for seeking out and creating such texts in schools have grown steadily. For example, the availability and use of the Internet, applications for creating digital documents and presentations, and similar digital activities has increased substantially since the mid-1990s. The parallel increase of electronic texts in academia, which includes electronic versions of dissertations and the gradual recognition of electronic journals as respected outlets for rigorous scholarship, suggests a continued expansion of multimedia forms into the mainstream of literate activity at all academic levels.

A further impetus to broadening the scope of literacy in relation to multimedia is the shift from viewing literacy primarily as a set of isolated, minimal, functional skills for reading and writing in schools: Literacy is a much larger sociocultural phenomenon that has implications for personal agency and for a nationalistic competitiveness and globalization. The imperatives for literacy, the definitions of its importance in world of the early twenty-first century, and the ideas about how it might best be developed have changed rapidly in both a technological and a sociocultural sense. Multimedia literacy, and the constellation of contemporary literacies that it encompasses, implies a broad conception of educational imperatives and an understanding that digital transformations of reading and writing go far beyond the development of technological competence.

Thus, multimedia means can be thought of as an orientation of perspectives and values about a variety of literate activities across the sociocultural spectrum. For example, in law and ethics it may mean a transformation of concepts such as plagiarism, intellectual property, and copyright. In government and politics it may mean a transformation of the possibilities for shaping or controlling public opinion through the dissemination of information. In economics it may mean a transformation of commerce and how people purchase goods and services and how they manage their personal finances. In mass communication it may mean the transformation of how news organizations gather and disseminate information and who has access to it. In popular culture it may mean a transformation of the pragmatics of writing and reading texts such as determining what is acceptable and unacceptable when using e-mail. In education it may mean a transformation in what is considered a text, how texts are written and used, and ultimately perhaps the goals of education and the roles of teachers and students. Such potential transformations and how they might be accommodated in educational endeavors define the broad imperatives for considering literacy in terms of multimedia.

Theory and Research

On a theoretical plane, it is challenging to define precisely the relation between multimedia and literacy. What exactly comprises literacy has always been debatable and has increasingly been so in light of sociocultural perspectives. But, defining precisely what is meant by the term multimedia is equally challenging. That challenge is reflected in what might be considered a grammatical redundancy or, at least, an ambiguousness. Media is technically a plural form of the word medium, making multimedia somewhat redundant in a literal sense. Yet, media in popular usage has become a collective noun that originated in the field of advertising to designate agencies of mass communication. Whereas considering multimedia in relation to literacy may include an understanding and critical analysis of mass media in the collective sense, it implies much more in light of the digital forms of representation. That is, digital forms of representation often blend what might intuitively seem to be individual media into combinations heretofore not possible or feasible. Doing so, however, begs the question of where the boundaries are between media. Put another way, what precisely is a medium? Is a medium elemental in terms of a perceptual mode? That is, might audio and visual presentations be different media? Or, is a medium defined in terms of its technological materiality? That is, the writing of a conventional essay with pen, pencil, typewriter, or word processor employs the use of distinctly different media with potentially different effects. Or might a medium be defined in terms of technological capabilities? That is, a picture or video on a television and computer screen may be identical in appearance, but they are not necessarily equal in their potential opportunities for viewer interaction, and might, thus, be considered different media. Or, does identifying an individual medium require considering all these differences in some illdefined way? Addressing these and similar questions and issues may be important in translating how literacy might be seen in terms of multimedia into agenda for practice and for research. In other words, knowing what a medium is and what individual media, if any, comprise a means of communication seem fundamental to understanding literacy from the perspective of multimedia and how such literacy might be developed.

In 1979 Gavriel Salomon offered a well-developed and often-cited theory of media and learning relevant to these questions and issues, and it illustrates the type of theory that might be useful. It is useful in part because it transcends more superficial, popular definitions of media that are linked to longstanding forms of communication, and it more readily recognizes and accommodates rapid changes in the technologies of communication. In his scheme a medium can be defined, and thus analyzed and reflected upon, as a configuration of four elements: symbol systems, technologies, contents, and situations. Symbol systems and the technologies used to present them are intertwined and critical because they define the cognitive requirements for extracting information from a medium and consequently what skills become necessary for those who wish to use the medium successfully. In this view, a conventional musical score and a topographical map are different media because they require different cognitive skills for extracting information. Symbol systems and technologies also importantly set the limits of the degree to which a medium can assist those who do not have the requisite skills to extract useful information. For example, Salomon demonstrated that the technological capabilities of the film camera (now also the video camera), specifically the capability to zoom in for a close-up, could increase attention to relevant detail among learners who had difficulty doing so on their own. Contents and situations, the remaining components that define a medium, are more socially defined correlates than necessary qualities of individual media. For example, textbooks rarely have overt advertisements (contents), although they could, and breaking news events are rarely viewed in a movie theater (situations), although they indeed used to be. Thus, among its other advantages, this theoretical perspective accommodates both cognitive and sociocultural dimensions of multimedia and literacy.

There are other relevant theoretical perspectives that might define multimedia and guide research. Research and practice in relation to multimedia literacy has frequently been ad hoc and atheoretical, however. Further, within mainstream literacy research there have been relatively few published studies guided by an awareness of new technologies and media. The body of research focusing on literacy is overwhelmingly aimed at the conventional use of printed materials. However, three studies illustrate the range of possibilities for research in this area and the type of approaches that may lead to important understandings about literacy in terms of multimedia, including learning from texts, integrating multimedia into instruction, and expanding students' sociocultural awareness of textual information. For example, in 1991 Mary Hegarty and colleagues used a cognitive perspective to demonstrate how students with low mechanical ability learned more from text describing a machine when its operation was animated on a computer screen than when it was shown as a series of static pictures in a conventional printed text. Ruth Garner and Mark G. Gillingham, using case studies, documented in 1996 how literate activity as well as the roles of teachers and students changed when e-mail and Internet access were introduced into classrooms. Jamie Myers and colleagues described in 1998 how involving students in creating multimedia hypertexts about literacy and historical figures such as Pocahantas led to a critical stance toward various sources of information.

Further Thoughts

For the early twenty-first century, considering literacy in terms of multimedia relates directly to important changes and trends in conceptions of literacy beginning in the late twentieth century. This perspective makes particularly poignant the shift from printed to digital texts and the implications of that shift for reconceptualizing literacy in light of new and diverse modes of communication. Yet, incorporating multimedia into conceptions of literacy remains imprecise and has yet to provide an unambiguous guide for theory, research, and practice.

See also: Literacy, subentry on Learning from Multimedia Sources; Media and Learning; Technology in Education.

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David Reinking

NARRATIVE COMPREHENSION AND PRODUCTION

Narratives convey causally and thematically related sequences of actual or fictional events. Narratives have a hierarchical schematic structure. At the highest level, they consist of a setting, a theme, a plot, and a resolution. The components of the setting are characters, a location, and a time. Thus, the typical opening sentence of a fairy-tale, "Once upon a time in a far-away kingdom, there was a princess who…" conveys the setting in a nutshell, as does the more colloquial "Last night I was at a restaurant when…". The theme can consist of a goal (the princess wanted to get married) or an event and a goal (a fire broke out at the restaurant and I was trying to call 911). The plot is a causally related sequence of events, usually describing the character's attempts to achieve his or her goal. The resolution describes the achievement of the character's goal. Of course, many literary narratives omit the resolution. An example is Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot (1953), whose main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, are waiting for a third character, Godot, to arrive. But Godot never arrives, thus spawning decades of literary analysis about the meaning of the play. However, most stories exhibit the stereotypical structure described above.

Aristotle in Poetics identified the plot as the major organizing structure of narratives and admonished poets to describe events only when they are relevant to the plot, just as Homer had done centuries before them. They were to refrain from giving a blow-by-blow chronological account of an episode. This Aristotle considered to be the province of historians.

Cohesion and Coherence in Narratives

In order to make sense, narratives need to be cohesive and coherent. Two successive sentences are said to be cohesive when they share information, as indicated by linguistic markers, such as pronouns or connectives. Thus, the sentence pair in (1) is cohesive because the pronoun he in the second sentence refers back to the runner mentioned in the first sentence.

(1) The runner jumped over the puddle. He did not want to get his feet wet.

On the other hand, the sentence pair in (2) is not cohesive; there is no word in the second sentence that directly refers back to the first.

(2) The runner jumped over the puddle. It is unpleasant to get your feet wet.

Yet, sentence pair (2) does seem to make sense: The second sentence provides a motivation for the action in the first sentence. Thus, the two sentences can be connected by generating a bridging inference. A sentence pair like (2) is said to be locally coherent. Now consider sentence pair (3).

(3) The runner jumped over the puddle. Airplanes seldom leave on time.

This pair is neither cohesive nor locally coherent (i.e., it is not easy to generate a bridging inference). Thus, the connection between successive sentences can be established through cohesion markers or through bridging inferences (or a combination of the two). Is this sufficient to produce a coherent text? Consider the following passage.

The runner jumped over the puddle. There were some frogs in the puddle. Frogs are often used as characters in fairy tales. Fairy tales are narratives. This entry is about narratives.

Although this "text" maintains local coherence–each sentence can be connected with its predecessor–it lacks an overall point. Thus, an important characteristic of narratives is that they have an overarching point or theme. This is called global coherence.

Empirical Approaches to the Study of Narrative

Cognitive psychologists have been able to uncover a great deal about how people understand narratives by assessing, among other things, what people recall from a story, how quickly people read certain words or sentences, or how quickly they respond to probe words. For example, it is clear that people use their expectations about the stereotypical structure of stories when understanding a story. It is also clear that people make inferences about the motives behind characters' actions and about the causes of events when these are not explicitly stated in the text in order to establish both local and global coherence. Consider the two sentence pairs below.

(5) The spy threw the report in the fire. The ashes floated up the chimney.

(6) The spy threw the report in the fire. Then he called the airline.

In sentence pair (5) the bridging inference that the report burned is needed to establish local coherence between the two sentences, but in (6) no such inference is needed because of the cohesive link between spy and he. In experiments, participants respond more quickly to the probe word burn after sentence pair (5) than after sentence pair (6), suggesting that the inference about the report burning was activated during the reading of (5) but not during the reading of (6).

There is a wealth of evidence that comprehenders do more than simply generate bridging inferences to connect sentences. What they do is construct mental representations of the situations that are described in the text, situation models, rather than just mental representations of the text itself. Consider sentence pairs (7) and (8).

(7) Mike started playing the piano. A moment later, his mother entered the room.

(8) Mike stopped playing the piano. A moment later, his mother entered the room.

Participants in experiments responded more quickly to the probe word playing after sentences such as (7) than after sentences such as (8). The reason for this is that in (7) Mike is still playing the piano after his mother has entered, whereas in (8) he is not. Thus, in (7) playing the piano is still part of the situation, but in (8) it is not. If the subjects were merely constructing representations of the texts, no difference should have been found, given that the word playing appeared in both texts.

Narrative Production as a Window into Comprehension

Writing involves cognitive operations that are the result of thinking, such as collecting information, generating ideas, turning these ideas into written text, and reviewing the text for its meaningfulness. In narratives, the thoughts, perceptions, fantasies, and memories of the writer are incorporated in a coherent narrative structure, either in oral or written language.

Knowledge of the prototypical structure of a mode of discourse is important for its construction and comprehension. A narrative about a major disaster, such as the explosion of the Challenger shuttle, will be written and processed in a different manner than a newspaper article about it. Whereas a newspaper article will focus on the facts, a narrative would include other elements, such as a plot and a narrator or a character-based perspective leading the reader through the sequence of events. The comprehension strategies of a narrative or a newspaper article about the explosion will be different as well, with a stronger focus on stylistic aspects and smaller focus on criteria of truth when using literary comprehension strategies than when using expository text comprehension strategies.

Although the boundaries between narratives and other forms of discourse are not clear-cut, narratives share certain features, such as a narrative structure that enables the reader to seek meaning and generate meaning from the narrative, and a potential to have an emotional impact on the reader or listener.

Affective and Esthetic Aspects of Narrative Comprehension and Production

Most narratives possess a dramatic quality that is created from an imbalance between narrative components, for instance different characters with opposing goals or a sequence of events leading to a tragic outcome for one of the characters. The dramatic quality as well as the style of the narrative will draw the reader into a convincing fictional world of goals, emotions, and motivations. Narrative style will stir the reader's imagination. For example, foregrounding of narrative elements, such as references to the devil in Elizabeth Bowen's The Demon Lover (1959), will aid the reader in imagining the true nature of the relationship between the main characters.

An imbalance in the sequence of events can affect the emotional response of the reader, in particular suspense, curiosity, and surprise. According to the structural affect theory, suspense is evoked by postponing the narrative's outcome, thereby creating uncertainty for the reader on the issue of what is going to happen next in the narrative. Curiosity arises when the outcome of the narrative is presented before the preceding events, whereas surprise occurs as a result of an unexpected event in the narrative, such as the sudden appearance of the pawn-broker's half-sister when Raskolnikov kills the pawnbroker in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866).

The kinds of emotions that readers experience while reading or listening to a narrative can be the result of being drawn into the fictional world of the narrative and identifying with the characters. These emotions are called "fictional emotions." Reader emotions can also be the result of analyzing and appreciating the narrative structure and techniques, called "artifact emotions" by Eduard Tan. The overall enjoyment of reading the narrative is based on both types of emotions. Narrative techniques, in particular switches in the role of narrators, can be used to make the reader go from observation to identification in different parts of the narrative or throughout the narrative.

Comparisons of Narratives in Different Cultures

Apart from being entertaining, many narratives also reflect moral values as a commentary on a society, include the preservation of events central to a culture, or aim to create an identity of a group. A culture is a shared perspective regarding ways of life and symbolic systems maintained within a social group. Narratives can help to establish an identity in a multicultural context, such as postmodernist literature, or preserve or create a group's identity within one culture, such as feminist poetry or Navajo narratives. Group identity is especially important for minority groups within a multicultural society. These groups share common interests and customs that act as a basis for constructive memory to be passed on to future generations.

The preservation of cultural elements from a group and the manner in which they are delivered can be one focus of narratives in cultural groups. Many Native American narratives preserve and transfer cultural traditions and tribal discourse through oral techniques of pause, pitch, and tempo. Another focus of narratives in cultural groups is the reflection of moral and aesthetic values within those groups. This can be the result of exclusionary mechanisms from a dominant cultural group that urges minority cultures to develop their own means of literary production and aesthetic norms with their own unique features. The incorporation of blues lyrics in African-American poetry is unique to that group, as is the inclusion of the native or modified language into poems and narratives in Chicano, Caribbean, and African-American cultures.

Narrative production and reception in one culture will strengthen and preserve the aesthetic norms and traditions within that culture. For individuals from other cultures, reading or listening to these narratives may help to translate these specific cultural elements into their own experiences and provide a better understanding of cultures and cultural issues other than their own, such as the dual personality issue in Chinese-American and Japanese-American culture. The narrative structure and the elicitation of fictional and artifact emotions will help this process. As Eileen Oliver suggests, part of the reception process may be that readers and listeners become more aware of the dynamics of cultural exchange in which assimilation, retention, and transformation of new cultural features are in constant progress.

See also: Literacy and Reading; Reading, subentries on Comprehension, Reading from Text.

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Rolf A. Zwaan

Katinka Dijkstra

VOCABULARY AND VOCABULARY LEARNING

How does one help students learn vocabulary? Solutions take two general directions: one focuses on learning word meanings from context through wide reading and the other on the need for direct instruction about word meanings.

What Is Known and How to Know It

The divergent recommendations of wide reading versus direct instruction derive from different assumptions about the extent of vocabulary knowledge, that is, how many words children typically know, and how readily new words are learned. For example, rapid word learning and large vocabularies would indicate a lesser role for instruction, while slower growth would indicate need for intervention.

Vocabulary size and growth. A key issue is that estimates of vocabulary size vary widely. For example, estimates of total vocabulary size for first graders have ranged from about 2,500 (Edward Dolch and Madorah E. Smith) to about 25,000 (Burleigh Shibles and Mary Katherine Smith), and for college students from 19,000 (Edwin Doran and Edwin Kirkpatrick) to 200,000 (George Hartmann).

Situations with such wide variations make it impossible to simply ask people how many words they know, so estimates must be based on testing people's word knowledge of a sample of words and extrapolating to a final figure. To construct such tests, decisions must be made about what is taken as evidence of knowledge of a word, what constitutes a single word (e.g., should individuals who know the word walk be credited with knowing the word walking? ), and how a sample of words is chosen to represent the language. All these decisions open the door to wide discrepancies in vocabulary size estimations.

Work on what constitutes a word and on techniques for constructing a language sample have helped bring estimates into greater agreement. Consequently, estimates in the early twenty-first century place vocabulary size for five-to six-year-olds at between 2,500 and 5,000 words. But although the problems of older work on vocabulary size are understood, there are (as of 2001) no recent, large-scale studies that correct these problems.

Estimates of vocabulary size at different ages are also used to estimate rates of vocabulary growth. Specific estimates of vocabulary growth, not surprisingly, vary widely, from three (Martin Joos) to twenty new words per day (George Miller). A figure of seven words per day is probably the most commonly cited.

Whatever the reality, it is certain that there are wide individual differences in both vocabulary size and growth. Studies have found profound differences among learners from different ability or socioeconomic groups, from toddlers through high school. For example, Mary Katherine Smith reported that high-knowledge third graders had vocabularies about equal to lowest-performing twelfth graders. These differences, once established, appear difficult to ameliorate. This is because children whose backgrounds provide rich verbal environments not only learn more words initially, but they also acquire understanding about language that enables them to continue to learn words more readily.

Learning from context. Most word meanings are learned from context. This is true from the earliest stages of a child's language acquisition onward, but the type of context changes. Early learning takes place through oral context, while later vocabulary learning shifts to written context. Written context lacks many of the features of oral language that support learning new word meanings, features such as intonation, body language, and shared physical surroundings. Thus, written context is a less efficient vehicle for learning. Research shows that learning from written context occurs, but in small increments. Machteld Swanborn and Kees de Glopper estimate that of one hundred unfamiliar words met in reading, between three and eight will be learned. Thus, students could substantially increase vocabulary if two conditions are met. First, students must read widely enough to encounter a substantial number of unfamiliar words. Second, students must have the skills to infer word-meaning information from the contexts they read. The problem is that many students in need of vocabulary development do not engage in wide reading, especially of the kinds of books that contain unfamiliar vocabulary, and these students are less able to derive meaningful information from context. So depending on wide reading as a source of vocabulary growth could leave some students behind.

Direct instruction. The most commonly cited problem with direct instruction to address students' vocabulary needs is that there are too many words to teach. This is certainly true if the goal is to teach all the words in a language. Consider, however, a mature vocabulary as comprising three tiers. The first tier consists of basic words–mother, ball, go –that rarely require instructional attention. The third tier contains words of low frequency that are typically limited to specific domains–isotope, peninsula, refinery. These words are appropriate for specific needs, such as introducing the word peninsula during a geography lesson. The second tier contains high frequency, general words, such as compromise, extraordinary, and typical. Because of the large role tier-two words play in a language user's repertoire, instruction directed toward these could be valuable in contributing to vocabulary growth.

What kind of instruction should be offered? The answer depends on the goal. Typically, educators want students to know words well enough to facilitate reading comprehension and to use the words in their own speech and writing. Facilitating comprehension seems a reasonable goal, given the well-established relationship between vocabulary knowledge and comprehension. Although virtually all studies that present vocabulary instruction result in students learning words, few have succeeded in improving comprehension. In analyzing this discrepancy, researchers, such as Steven Stahl and Marilyn Fairbanks, found that to influence comprehension instruction needs to: (1) present multiple exposures of words; (2) involve a breadth of information, beyond definitions; (3) engage active processing by getting students to think about and interact with words.

Effective instruction should accomplish the following:

• Begin with information about the word's meaning, but not necessarily a formal definition.
• Immediately prompt students to use the word.
• Keep bringing the words back in a variety of formal and informal ways.
• Get students to take their word learning beyond the classroom.
• Help students use context productively.

Status of Vocabulary Issues

Although there is general consensus on effective vocabulary instruction, little of this kind of instruction is found in classrooms. Attention to vocabulary in classrooms focuses on looking up definitions and perhaps writing sentences for new words. The typical dictionary definitions, however, do not promote students' learning of new word meanings. In fact, often students do not even understand the definitions of the words they look up. Thus it is important to implement what is known about effective instruction into classrooms.

Much about the way vocabulary is learned and stored in memory is still unknown. How much learning comes from oral contexts past initial stages of acquisition? How much do early learning experiences matter and is it possible for children who lag early to catch up? What characteristics of verbal environments are most useful for word learning? For example, what are the roles of the amount of talk in a child's environment, the kinds of words used, and interactions within the environment? How is word knowledge organized? Research makes it clear that a person's vocabulary knowledge does not exist as a stored list of words, but rather as networks of relationships. This leads to the question, how do these networks of word relationships affect how readily and how well words are learned?

To help students improve their vocabulary, it will be necessary to put into practice what is already known about vocabulary learning and evaluate and refine the results.

See also: Instructional Design, subentry on Direct Instruction; Literacy and Reading; Reading, subentries on Comprehension, Content Areas; Spelling, Teaching of.

bibliography

Anglin, Jeremy M. 1993. Vocabulary Development: A Morphological Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Beals, Diane E., and Tabors, Patton O. 1995. "Arboretum, Bureaucratic, and Carbohydrates: Preschoolers' Exposure to Rare Vocabulary at Home." First Language 15:57–76.

Beck, Isabel L., and McKeown, Margaret G. 1983. "Learning Words Well: A Program to Enhance Vocabulary and Comprehension." The Reading Teacher 36 (7):622–625.

Beck, Isabel L., and McKeown, Margaret G. 1991. "Conditions of Vocabulary Acquisition." In Handbook of Reading Research, Vol. 2, ed. Rebecca Barr, Michael L. Kamil, Peter Mosenthal, and P. David Pearson. New York: Longman.

Beck, Isabel L.; McKeown, Margaret G.; and Omanson, Richard C. 1987. "The Effects and Uses of Diverse Vocabulary Instructional Techniques." In The Nature of Vocabulary Acquisition, ed. Margaret G. McKeown and Mary E. Curtis. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Biemiller, Andrew. 1999. Language and Reading Success: From Reading Research to Practice, Vol.5. Cambridge, MA: Brookline Books.

Dolch, Edward William. 1936. "How Much Word Knowledge Do Children Bring to Grade 1?" Elementary English Review 13:177–183.

Doran, Edwin W. 1907. "A Study of Vocabularies." Pedagogical Seminar 14:177–183.

Goerss, Betty L.; Beck, Isabel L.; and McKeown, Margaret G. 1999. "Increasing Remedial Students' Ability to Derive Word Meaning from Context." Reading Psychology 20 (2):151–175.

Graves, Michael F.; Brunetti, G. J.; and Slater, Wayne H. 1982. "The Reading Vocabularies of Primary-Grade Children of Varying Geographic and Social Backgrounds." In New Inquiries in Reading Research and Instruction, ed. Jerome A. Niles and Larry A. Harris. Rochester, NY: National Reading Conference.

Hart, Betty, and Risley, Todd. 1995. Meaningful Differences. Baltimore: Brookes.

Hartmann, George W. 1946. "Further Evidence on the Unexpected Large Size of Recognition Vocabularies among College Students." Journal of Educational Psychology 37:436–439.

Joos, Martin. 1964. "Language and the School Child." Harvard Educational Review 34:203–210.

Kirkpatrick, Edwin Asbury. 1891. "The Number of Words in an Ordinary Vocabulary." Science 18:107–108.

Landauer, Thomas, and Dumais, Susan. 1997. "A Solution to Plato's Problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis Theory of Acquisition, Induction, and Representation of Knowledge." Psychological Review 104:211–240.

McKeown, Margaret G. 1985. "The Acquisition of Word Meaning from Context by Children of High and Low Ability." Reading Research Quarterly 20:482–496.

McKeown, Margaret G. 1993. "Creating Effective Definitions for Young Word Learners." Reading Research Quarterly 28:16–31.

Meznski, Karen. 1983. "Issues Concerning the Acquisition of Knowledge: Effects of Vocabulary Training on Reading Comprehension." Review of Educational Research 53:253–279.

Miller, George A. 1985. "Dictionaries of the Mind." Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguists. Chicago: Association for Computational Linguists.

Nagy, William; Herman, Patricia; and Anderson, Richard. 1985. "Learning Words from Context." Reading Research Quarterly 20:233–253.

Shibles, Burleigh H. 1959. "How Many Words Does a First-Grade Child Know?" Elementary English 31:42–47.

Smith, Madorah Elizabeth. 1926. "An Investigation of the Development of the Sentence and the Extent of Vocabulary in Your Children." University of Iowa Studies in Child Welfare 5:219–227.

Smith, Mary Katherine. 1941. Measurement of the Size of General English Vocabulary through the Elementary Grades and High School. Provincetown, MA: The Journal Press.

Stahl, Steven A., and Fairbanks, Marilyn M. 1986. "The Effects of Vocabulary Instruction: A Model-Based Meta-Analysis." Review of Educational Research 56:7–110.

Sternberg, Robert J. 1987. "Most Vocabulary Is Learned from Context." In The Nature of Vocabulary Acquisition, ed. Margaret G. McKeown and Mary E. Curtis. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Swanborn, Machteld S. L., and De Glopper, Kees. 1999. "Incidental Word Learning While Reading: A Meta-Analysis." Review of Educational Research 69 (3):261–285.

Watts, Susan. 1995. "Vocabulary Instruction during Reading Lessons in Six Classrooms." Journal of Reading Behavior 27 (3):399–424.

Margaret G. McKeown

Isabel L. Beck

WRITING AND COMPOSITION

Skills or process? Visible in the history of writing instruction is the same controversy found in the rest of the language arts. Historically, writing instruction focused on handwriting and on correctness of the product produced through emphasis on what are sometimes referred to as the mechanics of writing (i.e., sentence structure, spelling, correct punctuation, etc.) and on rules. Students were usually asked to write to assigned topics or for purposes such as essay exams. They were seldom asked to write for an audience other than the teacher and the quality of the writing was much more likely to be judged on the basis of the correctness of its content and mechanics than on style or creative expression of ideas.

Writing Process Instruction

Gradually research began to make visible the processes of writing. With the writing project movement in the mid-to late 1970s concern for teaching the writing process emerged as a strong force. In the early stages of that movement the process was often described in a linear fashion as a series of four steps: pre-writing, writing, editing, and revision. Over time those concerned with writing instruction came to recognize and acknowledge through instruction that real writing is a much more messy reflexive and recursive process. With this understanding came the push to encourage students to write on topics of their own choosing, write for their own purposes, and perhaps most significantly, write to real audiences. As with most swings of the educational pendulum, by the late 1980s writing instruction in some schools had reached an extreme point where students might write exclusively in the genre of their choice and where attention to mechanics was seldom taught and/or required, even in pieces for publication.

During the 1990s politicians and the public at large increasingly called for rigorous academic standards and writing instruction shifted once again. In the early twenty-first century, teachers of writing or composition typically try to balance their desire to have students engage in writing in which they are personally invested, with the challenges of attention to correctness issues and to writing in a range of genres. Often these demands are tied to distinguishing between private and public writing. When the intended reader is an audience other than the author, the needs and expectations of that reader must be addressed if the writer's work is to be positively received.

With these shifts in the view of the writing process came the realization that the idea that writing is writing is not valid. That is, each discipline, indeed each piece of writing, has its own demands in terms of genre, audience, purpose, situation, and even what is viewed as correctness. This realization, coupled with the belief that engaging in writing can influence cognitive development, led to the writing across the curriculum movement, resulting in pressure on all teachers, not just English or Language Arts teachers, to be teachers of writing. After all, which teacher is better prepared to help students develop the genre of lab report writing, the chemistry teacher or the English teacher? Accompanying this movement has been increased emphasis on tying reading and writing instruction together.

Technology As Tool

Within a decade of the emergence of the writing process movement, technology began to exert a significant influence on writing instruction. Early arguments centered around whether or not classrooms (especially elementary classrooms) should have a computer, and how or even if that computer should play a role in language arts instruction. Some argued for placing computers in one centralized lab, which students would visit as a whole class once or twice a week, rather than distributing computers across classrooms. Most of the educational software available by the mid-1980s provided little more than computerized versions of skill drills or workbook sheets, occasionally accompanied by programs to teach typing or rudimentary word processing. Even under these less than ideal circumstances, students and teachers recognized the potential of technology for contributing to the writing process. When one fourth grader was asked how the computer helped her to revise she stated succinctly, "you don't have to worry about the paper ripping." What she and others recognized was the power of technology to assist writers with the physical process of encoding their messages so that more time and effort could be given to the composing process.

While educators were arguing about if or how computer technology should affect classrooms, technology was continuing to evolve at a rapid pace and the accessibility of affordable computers outside the classroom soon rendered the argument moot. Children who came to school computer literate were supported by their parents in expecting (sometimes demanding) similar access at school. The impact on the school writing curriculum was profound, with computer literacy quickly becoming a major issue for both students and teachers.

As computers have become more affordable and pervasive in society at large they affect not just formal writing instruction in K–12 schools, but also instruction in other educational venues. Adult education and community college programs offer a variety of classes and programs aimed at developing computer literacy in a wide range of students and for a huge variety of uses. Colleges and university now typically expect their students to be computer literate, even in some cases providing or requiring a personal computer for each entering student.

Technology in Development of Writing and Composition Skills

These new writing technologies provide new choices and, in some cases, have led to a shifting emphasis in the development of writing abilities. Where there previously was an emphasis on traditional (paperand ink-based) products and processes, there is now an emphasis toward an evolving set of products and processes enabled by electronic technologies. Handwriting is no longer an issue. To a large extent issues of mechanics (e.g., spelling, grammar) are taken care of by employing the computer as editor.

At the same time, shifting definitions of literacy have affected technology and software use in educational settings. Moving from the early days of computer drills and grammar checkers, to expressive freewriting or "invisible" writing on computer screens, to cognitive-based heuristic programs, to social functions of networked writing, technology use in writing instruction has mirrored the important theoretical and empirical approaches to teaching writing in traditional classrooms. This emphasizes a shift from viewing writing technology as a tool for delivering instruction to a technology that engages students as socially interactive participants. A new genre of writing with its own vocabulary and conventions has been born through such technology-related venues as e-mail, chat rooms, listservs, and MOOs (Multiple User Dimensions/Object Oriented, which arose out of online game-playing in text-based virtual reality environments). Writing in hypertext, with its ability to link writing through the click of a pointing device, is one example of this powerful new interactivity for writers and readers.

Traditional writing concerns such as understanding purpose and the importance of audience awareness have a renewed emphasis in technologically rich writing environments. Some teachers have successfully used technology to show students the importance of these traditional writing concerns in a writing environment with social relevance to students' lives. For example, discussions about audience naturally follow when writing is published on the Internet, whether to a known audience, as in personal e-mail, or a potentially unknown audience, as part of a website. Likewise, purposeful writing is given new importance when writers communicate with readers via electronic mail, electronic bulletin boards, synchronous discussion, or web sites–how readers interpret meaning in these contexts may shift, and students writing electronically need to carefully consider the crucial role of purpose in their writing.

Although issues of organization and style have always been important aspects of writing and composition (though sometimes underemphasized instructionally), technology provides a myriad of new options for writers to consider. Issues that previously were the concern of copy editors, publishers, and graphic artists have become the concern of authors. Developing writing skills in technologically rich environments may include elements of visual literacy skills, such as using graphics or integrated images within a text. Word processing and publishing software give developing writers the option, or in some cases the need, to learn about document design as it relates to writing. Composing in hypertext allows the writer to insert links from one part of a document to another, or if the document is made available online, writers can link to different texts and sites available over the network. Whether a document is composed on a word processor or marked-up for World Wide Web publication, writers are presented with previously unavailable choices of font styles, sizes, colors, and other symbols, including moving or still images and graphics. Writers can vary patterns of organization manipulating texts using electronic "cut and paste" tools, and writing in hypertext offers a nearly infinite number of organizational options controlled, in part, by the reader.

Taken together, these new choices and shifting emphases represent a changing literacy landscape. In this new context, writing instruction continues to evolve as the uses and processes of writing change.

See also: Technology in Education; Writing, Teaching of.

bibliography

Bazerman, Charles. 1988. Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Flower, Linda, and Hayes, John. 1981. "A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing." College Composition and Communication 32:365–387.

Graves, Donald. 1980. "Research Update: A New Look at Writing Research." Language Arts 57:913–919.

Gray, James. 2000. Teachers at the Center: A Memoir of the Early Years of the National Writing Project. Berkeley, CA: National Writing Project.

Hairston, Maxine. 1982. "The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing." College Composition and Communication 33:76–88.

Hawisher, Gail E. 1994. "Blinding Insights: Classification Schemes and Software for Literacy Instruction." In Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning with Technology, ed. Cynthia L. Selfe, and Susan Hilligoss. New York: The Modern Language Association of America.

Hawisher, Gail; LeBlanc, Paul; Moran, Charles; and Selfe Cynthia. 1996. Computers and the Teaching of Writing in American Higher Education, 1979-1994: A History. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Murray, James. 1990. A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Twentieth-Century America. Davis, CA: Hermagoras.

Nessel, Denise; Jones, Margaret; and Dixon, Carol. 1987. Thinking Through the Language Arts. New York: Macmillan.

Carol N. Dixon

Christopher Johnston

Literacy

Extent of literacy

Evaluating literacy data

The meaning of literacy figures

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Whenever the term “literacy” is used, a context is always implied. If the context is archeological, anthropological, or ethnographic, literacy usually refers to the cultural fact that writing has been invented and that the society contains a class, a caste, or an occupational group whose members keep accounts or preserve religious and moral precepts in written form or use writing for some other specific purpose. So used, literacy implies also the contrasting idea of preliteracy —a cultural stage in which writing has not yet been invented. The change from preliteracy to literacy—the spread of literate societies throughout the world—probably began in ancient Sumer during the fourth millennium B.C., through a gradual transition from pictography to the use of an alphabet.

If literacy is used in a historical or modern comparative context, then the implied contrast is with illiteracy. Literacy then refers to the degree of dissemination among a society’s population of the dual skills of reading and writing. Here a “literate” society is one in which most adult members can read and write at least a simple message. In this context, England, the United States, Sweden, Den-mark, the U.S.S.R., and Japan are among the literate societies, whereas Iraq, Haiti, and Nigeria, for example, can be called illiterate—or, at least, not yet literate—societies, even though they contain many highly educated persons.

Extent of literacy

As the great variation between countries with respect to illiteracy (Table 1) has become better known, concern about its consequences has greatly increased. For some, the existence of high levels of illiteracy detracts from the dignity of man and constitutes evidence of immense numbers of personal tragedies for the illiterate adults who are thereby prevented from escaping poverty and mental isolation. To others, illiteracy is primarily an obstacle to peaceful and friendly international relations and to democratic processes within countries. Still others are aware that low levels of literacy act as brakes on the advance of countries along the paths of social and economic development and political power. These concerns have brought on a variety of efforts to gather detailed information on the extent of literacy in the world’s countries and on the conditions under which the diffusion of literacy takes place.

From a world perspective, it is evident that in 1950, the latest date for which world-wide esti-mates are available, some 53 per cent of the world’s population aged 10 and over were able to read and write a simple sentence; that is, in 1950 there were at least 800 million illiterates above the age of 10. The dissemination of literacy skills that has taken place since then is unlikely to have raised the per-

centage to 60 or to have decreased the number of illiterates very much below 800 million, since population has grown very rapidly in this period. But, as Table 2 shows, the 1950 level represented a considerable proportionate gain over 1920 and 1930.

The literacy revolution

The world’s transformation from largely illiterate to moderately literate began in the industrial nations of western Europe; the recent gains in world literacy reflect the entrance into this transition of an ever-increasing number of countries in many areas. As Table 1 shows, the differential spread of the literacy transition in 1950 suggests that today’s countries can be arranged along a literacy scale that exhibits a definite pattern. The lowest rates exist in those areas that have completed the transition; the highest, in areas such as Ghana, Iraq, or Haiti, in which the transition has hardly begun; and between these two extremes fall all those countries, such as India, Pakistan, Bolivia, Paraguay, Mexico, and the Philippines, which are in the midst of the transformation.

The transformation from preponderantly illiterate to literate in the world’s old industrial nations, which was accomplished in about 75 to 100 years, can be documented from official information and from estimates. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, although literacy and schooling were more general than is often realized (Anderson & Bowman 1965, p. 345), at least half the adult population of England and Wales was illiterate; in 1850 the pro-portion had probably dropped to about 45 per cent. By 1910 illiteracy had been largely eliminated, with perhaps 5 per cent of the adults still illiterate and these concentrated in the older age groups; in 1914 0.8 per cent of the men and 1.0 per cent of the women signed the marriage register by mark (for all these estimates, see UNESCO 1957, pp. 177 ff.).

The decline of illiteracy in countries entering the literacy transition later can be shown by information for the U.S.S.R., Italy, and Greece. In Russia illiteracy declined very rapidly—from about 76 per cent in 1897, according to official census figures, to about 2 per cent in the early 1960s in the population aged 9 and over (United Nations, Statistical Office 1963, p. 312). In Italy and Greece the transition has been slower. In Italy, illiteracy among marriage registrants declined from 65.8 per cent in 1872 to 3.3 per cent in 1951 (UNESCO 1957, p. 169); illiteracy among persons 10 and over fell from 75 per cent, according to the 1861 census, to about 8 per cent, according to the 1961 census. In Greece illiteracy in the population aged 8 years and over declined from 60 per cent in 1907 to about 25 per cent in 1951 (UNESCO 1957, p. 90).

Because the world’s transformation from illiterate to moderately literate had its start in the West and has been completed primarily in the world’s urban-industrial countries, these nations have a disproportionate share of the world’s literate population (Table 2). In some major areas of the world, such as India, Pakistan, and Egypt, the proportion of the adult population that is illiterate is still very high. In India the illiteracy rate for the population aged 10 and over declined from 95 per cent in 1881 to about 70 per cent in 1961, according to the 1961 census (Demographic Yearbook, 1964, p. 698). Whereas the decline of illiteracy in Pakistan and Egypt has followed about the same pattern as in India, some areas, such as Haiti, Mozambique, and Ghana (Table 1) have hardly begun the transition. Even the breakdown by continents understates the concentration of the literate population, because within both Asia and Africa the literate population is mainly in a few countries or in cities. For example, in 1950 Japan—the major highly literate nation of Asia exclusive of the U.S.S.R.—had only 6 per cent to 7 per cent of Asia’s total population but at least 20 per cent of its adult literates. Future literacy gains for the world as a whole depend, then, very heavily on the degree to which the highly illiterate countries of the world become involved in this educational transformation.

Evaluating literacy data

Official literacy information can often be obtained from enumerations of total populations (census counts), though sometimes it is based on marriage registers, on tests given to military recruits, or on sample surveys. The results of these enumerations are usually made available in official sources. While minor census inaccuracies can rarely be detected, major inaccuracies in literacy enumeration are discoverable through careful evaluation or by check through independent estimates. For example, because past school enrollment rates for all countries correlate moderately highly with present literacy rates, for a specific country past enrollment rates provide one means of checking the accuracy of census results on literacy.

Definitions of literacy

Census definitions of literacy usually refer to the minimum level of literacy skills; hence they are relatively simple and clear. Yet they still differ slightly from country to country because the instructions to enumerators incorporate somewhat different conceptions of what constitutes the minimum level. In India, for example, government statisticians have instructed enumerators to count as literate only those who have the ability to read and write a simple message in any language, a definition proposed by the United Nations Population Commission. When these instructions are carried out by local school-teachers, few persons are likely to be counted as literate who do not have the minimum skills. In 1930 Finland applied perhaps the strictest minimum definition: only those persons were classified as literate who passed a rather difficult test. Those who failed were divided into two categories, the semiliterates, that is, persons who could read and write but made orthographic errors, and the illiterates, who could neither read nor write (UNESCO 1957, p. 29). By contrast, in the Hong Kong census of 1961 (as in many others) a person who said that he was able to read a language was assumed by inference also to be able to write it and was classified as literate. The acceptance of what the enumerator is told may result in inflating the percentage literate or, in some special cases, lowering this percentage (Davis 195la, p. 151).

Literacy proportions

Because of differences in definition and in enumeration procedure, no actual figure or proportion can be accepted with complete certainty for any area; however, for word-wide comparisons and analyses of literacy, we can profitably use a given proportion as an indicator of the literacy level achieved by a country. The use of literacy proportions as indicators makes it easier to take advantage of literacy proportions available from enumerations of such segments of the population as marriage registrants or recruits. For example, in the 1930s the proportions obtained by each of these enumeration procedures placed France among the highly literate nations of the world (UNESCO 1957, p. 22).

Even when we treat literacy proportions as indicators, it is still desirable to eliminate children from the calculations of rates and to compare rates for the same age groups—preferably 10 and over or 15 and over. Underdeveloped countries frequently have a large proportion of their population under 10 years and cannot manage to teach even the minimum literacy skills until about that age. However, in some cases (see Table 1) it is necessary, for lack of more detailed information, to use the rates for age groups 5 and over, 9 and over, or 15 and over as estimates for the age group 10 and over.

Obviously, illiteracy rates for the total population, as well as for persons aged 5 and over, are higher than for any of the older age groups; in India, for example, the rate for the total population in 1951 was 83.4 per cent, whereas for the population aged 10 and over it was 80.1 per cent. The rates for the age groups 10 and over and 15 and over are usually quite close; for example, in 1948 in the Philippines the illiteracy rate for each of these age groups was about the same.

For detailed comparisons between two countries, age-group differences and other variations in enumeration results—as in the number of persons returned as “literacy status unknown” or “age status unknown”—must be carefully examined. When literacy proportions are used as indicators, these variations create problems only in rare cases.

Use of estimates

Since some countries have never taken censuses and others have not taken a census for many years, an appraisal of the world’s literacy status at one time, 1950, must rely to some extent on estimates. The fact that estimates are used need not imply inaccuracy; some estimates are superior in accuracy to the average census. If, for example, the estimate is derived from reasonably accurate census returns on literacy or from valid statistical noncensus information, or from both, it may be quite reliable. For instance, on the basis of school enrollment information it was estimated that the illiteracy rate for Iraq in 1950 would be 85 per cent of the population aged 10 and over; the census returns for 1953 showed 89.1 per cent illiterate for the population aged 5 and over, or about 85 per cent for the population aged 10 and over.

China and Indonesia present perhaps the most difficult problems of estimating literacy rates. For China there are no national census figures on illiteracy available, and because of the paucity of other accurate information estimates range from 50-55 per cent illiterate for the population aged 15 and over (UNESCO 1957, pp. 16-17) to 70-75 per cent for the population aged 10 and over (Golden 1955, passim). The estimate for Indonesia also requires special comment. The census returns of 1930 gave Indonesia an illiteracy rate of 90 per cent for the population aged 10 and over; this figure is so high that it raises doubts about the official estimate of 39 per cent for the population aged 13 to 45 (United Nations 1963c, p. 15). Other estimates for Indonesia suggest an illiteracy level of 80-85 per cent for persons aged 15 and over (UNESCO 1957, p. 39) and 75-80 per cent for the population aged 10 and over (Golden 1955, passim). But despite such occasional anomalies and the general impossibility of absolute exactness, world-wide comparisons and analyses can most usefully be undertaken.

The meaning of literacy figures

The unequal distribution of literacy skills in the world stems from the fact that behind a given level of literacy lies the whole institutional structure of a society, particularly the occupational structure. Hence, the sharp contrasts in literacy levels between developed and underdeveloped countries (see Table 2) reflect the differential spread of industrialism through the world; the slighter differences among countries at about the same level of industrial development indicate other differences in the countries’ institutional structure. Transition from illiteracy to literacy for a whole country is accompanied usually by differential rates of transition within the population. Literacy skills are acquired more readily by young adults than by the aged; by those aiming for skilled occupations for themselves or their children; and by those—such as city dwellers—who have relatively easy access to the means of learning. In general, then, throughout the transition some literacy differentials within countries are predictable.

Literacy and economic development

The close connection between the prevalence of literacy skills among the adult population of a society and the nature of the society—s occupational skills has been demonstrated in several ways. In the first place, the invention of writing itself was clearly connected with other changes in human societies, such as increased occupational differentiation and the emergence of the first true cities. In general, the presence or absence of writing has been used as a criterion to distinguish between civilizations and tribal societies. Further, it should be emphasized that no country’s adult population became preponderantly literate until after the industrial revolution. Statistically, the dissemination of literacy and the changes in the occupational structure in today’s industrial nations are very closely linked; the coefficients of correlation for these time series are all above .9, where 1.0 would indicate perfect correspondence (UNESCO 1957, pp. 177 ff.; Golden 1955, p. 3). Indeed, not only is mass literacy a recent phenomenon in any society, but it is still confined to a relatively few countries. For 1950 literacy rates of the countries and territories of the world and indicators of the degree of industrial development correlated better than .8 on a scale, where 1.0 would have indicated perfect correspondence (Golden 1955, p. 3; United Nations 1961, p. 42).

The transformation from an illiterate to a literate society is triggered, so most authors suggest, by pressures exerted on governments, on special groups, and on individuals by the changing conditions accompanying industrialization. But it is not easily achieved; the transition usually has taken at least 75 years, though in some spectacular cases only about 50 years. Some societies have at times diverted large shares of their means toward the diffusion of literacy, and others, small shares; as a result, in 1950 literacy progress in some countries was advanced and in others retarded, as compared with industrial change. For example, in 1950 Brazil and Yugoslavia were about equally developed (if industrial development is measured by the pro-portion of the male labor force in nonagricultural pursuits), yet Brazil had an illiteracy rate of more than 50 per cent whereas Yugoslavia’s rate was only about 25 per cent for the population aged 10 and over. This retardation or advance, so several authors have suggested, can prove to be a handicap or an asset for a country’s future economic progress (Davis 1955; Golden 1955; Anderson & Bowman 1965). A government’s assessment of its country’s educational position requires not only a knowledge of the literacy level achieved but also an evaluation of the literacy position in relation to the level of economic development.

Hildah. Golden

[See alsoCapital, Human; Education; Rural society.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abel, James f.; and Bond, Norman j. 1929 Illiteracy in the Several Countries of the World. Washington: Government Printing Office.

Anderson,c.arnold; and Bowman, Maryj. (editors) 1965 Education and Economic Development. Chicago: Aldine.

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Demographic Yearbook. → Issued annually by the United Nations since 1948. See especially the 1960 and 1964 volumes. Data in Table 1 extracted from Demographic Yearbook 1960, Copyright © United Nations 1961, are reproduced by permission.

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Harbison, Frederick; and Myers, Charlesa. 1964 Education, Manpower, and Economic Growth. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Hawkes, Jacquetta; and Woolley, Leonard 1963 Pre-history and the Beginnings of Civilization. New York: Harper. → See especially Part 2, Chapter 6 on “Languages and Writing Systems: Education.”

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Mcclelland, Davidc. 1966 Does Education Accelerate Economic Growth? Economic Development and Cultural Change 24, no. 3:257–278.

Russett, Bruce et al. 1964 World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. → See especially pages 221-226.

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Sullivan, Helen 1933 Literacy and Illiteracy. Volume 9, pages 511–523 in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan.

Unesco 1952 Basic Facts and Figures. Paris: Unesco.

Unesco 1953 Progress of Literacy in Various Countries. Paris: Unesco.

Unesco 1957 World Illiteracy at Mid-century: A Statistical Study. Paris: Unesco.

Unesco 1964 Economic and Social Aspects of Educational Planning. Paris: Unesco.

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United Nations, Department Of Economic And Social Affairs 1963a Report on the World Social Situation, 1963. New York: United Nations.

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LITERACY The ability to read and write in at least one language. This ability developed in West Asia in the third millennium BC, when the Sumerians developed a system of symbols to record spoken language. They were followed by the Syro-Palestinians who, between 2000 and 1000 BC, introduced a consonantal script using a small number of signs, the precursor of the alphabet. During the same period, increasingly complex commercial, administrative, and religious structures and growing urbanization led to the invention of WRITING systems in such other regions as Egypt, India, and China. In ancient cultures, literacy was rare and specialized, and therefore a token of considerable learning. In more recent centuries, however, the term has often been interpreted minimally: as at least the READING and writing of one's name, anyone unable to do so being classed as illiterate. In the 20c, however, the ability to read and write has been delimited in many ways and literacy is often used interchangeably with FUNCTIONAL LITERACY: the production and understanding of simple oral or written statements reflecting the social, economic, and educational conditions of a particular region. Yet the threshold of literacy is indeterminate, making exact measurements difficult or culturally variable. In 1965, at a world congress of ministers of EDUCATION. UNESCO adopted the view that ‘rather than an end in itself, literacy should be regarded as a way of preparing man for a social, civic and economic role that goes far beyond the limits of rudimentary literacy training consisting merely in the teaching of reading and writing’ (‘Literacy, Gateway to Fulfillment’, special issue of UNESCO Courier, June 1980).

Literacy in English

The earliest written English was the concern of a small minority of men, first in the runic alphabet, whose letters were carved on objects for both practical and ornamental purposes, then in the Roman alphabet introduced in Britain by Christian missionaries at the end of the 6c. Education remained for many centuries a province largely of the Roman Catholic Church and the need for reading and writing was not greatly extended until the introduction of movable type and inexpensive paper in the late 15c. This helped standardize written versions of English, expand the uses of literacy, and give reading and writing greater circulation among the populace. Determining who is literate and for what purposes has always been difficult. The collection of statistics tends to be confounded by the under-representation of people marginalized from the economic and political centres of a culture: for example, in censuses, by incomplete records, and by variable standards of what should be measured. Data such as signatures or court and ecclesiastical testimony have been used to estimate the degree of literacy in particular locales at particular times, but tend to depend on self-reports and minimal evidence; they give no account of such skills as comprehension of printed matter. Moreover, reading and writing have had different constituencies and uses during different periods. Thus, in the 17c Protestant communities of early New England, where male literacy was well above 60% by 1700, it was considered important to help women acquire reading skills for religious purposes but not writing because its ‘commercial uses lay beyond women's traditional sphere of activity’ ( Geraldine J. Clifford, ‘Buch und Lesen: Historical Perspectives on Literacy and Schooling’, Review of Educational Research 54, 1984).

Ideology and literacy

Deliberately taught rather than acquired like speech, literacy has traditionally been seen as a commodity delivered through political, educational, and religious bureaucracies. Reading, writing, and counting at sophisticated levels continued to be reserved first for the clergy and then for the sons of the aristocracy and of wealthy merchants; the term literacy in its 15–18c usages was regularly associated with a classical education and with priestly or civic élites. The literacy needs of most people, however, have tended to be functional: the production of reports, accounts, journals, and letters, and in recent times the completion of forms. Institutional arrangements for instruction in literacy according to the British and American models have, until the 20c, generally been aimed at achieving low to moderate levels of literacy for large numbers of people and higher levels for smaller privileged groups. Educational developments in 18c Scotland, linked with Presbyterianism, were typical: while the literacy rate for adult males jumped from 33% in 1675 to 90% in 1800, the increase was due to emphasis on reading, memorization, and recall of familiar material; neither writing nor the application of knowledge was demanded.

Literacy, knowledge, and problem-solving

The association of literacy with the acquisition of theoretical knowledge and the development of problem-solving abilities was by and large a product of the Industrial Revolution and, prior to the 20c, was generally confined to centres of education in cities. Country schools, whose pupils were needed to work the land and whose instructors were not always professionally certified, generally offered training in basic skills rather than fluency in written language. Both in town and country, however, children were drilled first on letter names and sounds, then on syllables and words. During the 19c, many reform-minded educators stressed the need for comprehension of reading materials, asserting that encountering words in context would lead students to a more rapid acquisition of meaning and a more appropriate use of emphasis and inflection. However, since lack of high-level literacy was regarded as neither degrading nor detrimental to economic or social advancement, 19c levels of literacy remained low while numbers of people described as literate grew.

During the 20c, attitudes to literacy have changed. School-based definitions of literacy and standards relating to year groups have been adopted in most English-speaking countries, as competency testing has replaced functional determinants. Paradoxically, because of heightened expectations and increased technological demands, many people who have exceeded traditional literacy criteria are now considered semiliterate or functionally illiterate. In addition, legislators, educators, and public activists throughout the English-speaking world have sought to broaden the social and personal dimensions of literacy through mandatory training in such things as historical literacy (awareness of the main outlines of history, especially as regards one's own country), cultural literacy (a knowledge of classical texts and great writers of one's own culture), mathematical literacy (also called numeracy), symbolic literacy (an appreciation of the value and use of symbols of various kinds), media literacy (familiarity with and a capacity to understand and to some extent evaluate the different media and what they provide), and computer literacy (familiarity with and ability to use a computer, without necessarily being able to write programs).

Conclusion

Literacy requirements, which often relate to and depend on such highly specific contexts as occupational need, continue to vary among social and economic groups, with low levels concentrated among the poor, the undereducated, and members of minority populations. Given the lack of contemporary agreement concerning its definitions and uses, literacy is best conceived as a continuum whose dissemination involves various kinds of behaviour at higher and lower levels, including reading, writing, speaking, listening, thinking, counting, coping with the demands of the state, of employment, and of social life. See ILLITERACY, SPELLING.

Literacy. Historically, literacy has meant the ability to read and/or write at a certain level of competence. But conceptions of literacy and its uses have been closely tied to specific historical contexts. In medieval and Renaissance Europe, before European settlers reached North America, the term litteratus, or “lettered,” meant competence in Latin and was associated with the clergy or the aristocracy. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the focus had shifted from Latin to vernacular languages, and the equation of literacy with aristocratic or clerical rank had been broken, despite the continuing complaints of cultural elites about the spread of literacy to the lower order.

Definitions and measures of literacy, especially for comparative purposes, are notoriously difficult. Until the mid–nineteenth century, signatures or marks on wills, petitions, or other documents offered the most direct and widest evidence of literacy or the lack thereof. In more recent times, censuses, school records, and various educational and “literacy” tests have been used. All measures, however, remain problematic and controversial.

Many researchers have treated literacy as a gauge of social, political, or cultural development. For some, it is a sign of modernity. In other interpretations, literacy has symbolic, ideological, and even mythic value. Interpretations of its meaning often conflict. In American history, literacy has been linked to the advancement of individuals and groups, but it has also been used to maintain inequalities associated with social class, race, gender, and other factors. Researchers, therefore, must consider literacy not as a neutral and abstract skill, but in relation to the value accorded to reading and writing by society at large or by particular subgroups in successive time periods. These values, in turn, have influenced the institutional resources that have been allocated to the spread or restriction of literacy. Legislatures in the antebellum South, for example, often made it illegal to teach a slave to read or write.

These distinctions divide American historians as they have divided Americans historically. For example, historians long assumed, with scant evidence, that the mainland North American British colonies, and then the United States, were more literate than Europe. Recent research has both confirmed and qualified this received wisdom. Colonial Era literacy levels, ranging from perhaps 50–60 to more than 90 percent for European immigrants and their descendents, were, indeed, high by European standards, but not unprecedentedly so. Literacy levels tended to reflect the levels of the regions from which the emigrants came and to reproduce existing social differences. Excepting enslaved Africans, literate individuals were more likely to emigrate, giving America a long‐standing social and developmental advantage. Yet, as literacy became more common and valued, it intertwined with the oral in American culture.

Religion—first a Protestantism rooted in individual access to the Bible—was long a spur to literacy, along with the desire for economic and social progress and concerns for social control and national status. Residents of New England and the Old Northwest particularly endorsed and diffused literacy. For many reasons, literacy was more restricted in the South and among racial and some ethnic minorities. Women's rates of literacy increased rapidly in the nineteenth century. African Americans and members of other minority groups waged impressive struggles for literacy. Over time, public schools increasingly took on responsibility for literacy training, replacing less formal ways of learning to read and write. As the literacy levels of virtually all groups rose in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, literacy's symbolic role as a marker of class distinctions declined.

Concerns about literacy have also masked a nativist desire to restrict the immigration of ethnic groups considered undesirable. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Immigration Restriction League repeatedly urged Congress to impose a literacy test for immigrants, as a means of controlling and reducing the influx of newcomers from southern and eastern Europe.

In the late twentieth century, issues related to literacy continued to stir intense controversy. Many observations and tests suggested that levels of “functional” literacy were dangerously low. Debate raged over whether Asian American and Hispanic American immigrant children should be taught in English or in their own languages, and over the establishment of English as the official national language. The rise of the new electronic media and the recognition of diverse modes of understanding and communicating suggested that the concept of literacy itself needed to be reexamined. Conservatives trumpeted their fears of an endangered “cultural literacy.”

But such controversies were hardly new. Throughout U.S. history, literacy has been a source of controversy and contention. What seemed clear, as the century ended, was that there are many forms of “literacy,” and that the whole issue would likely remain a volatile arena of ideological contestation.
See also Education: The Public School Movement; Immigration Law; Mobility; Nativist Movement; Slavery: Development and Expansion of Slavery.

Bibliography

Lawrence A. Cremin , American Education, 3 vols., 1970–1988.
Daniel H. Calhoun , The Intelligence of a People, 1973.
Harvey J. Graff , The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth‐Century City, 1979, reprint 1991.
Lee Soltow and and Edward Stevens , The Rise of Literacy and the Common School in the United States: A Socioeconomic Analysis to 1870, 1981.
Harvey J. Graff , The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Society and Culture, 1987.
Mike Rose , Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America's Underprepared, 1989.
Carl Kaestle et al. , Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading since 1880, 1991.

Harvey J. Graff

literacy. The initiation of printing promoted the adoption of a standard written form, notwithstanding the extent to which different dialects continued to be spoken, and it also increased the contexts within which reading and writing might be used. The progress of literacy in English outside the urban commercial and professional classes is charted with difficulty, but the incidence of written names and marks as signatures on leases, depositions, and petitions partly indicates its diffusion. In the early 17th century the majority of male members of the gentry, particularly those of Scottish or English origin, had writing skills. At mid‐century perhaps a third of the larger leaseholders could write their names, though striking variations, influenced by sex and race, were evident. At the end of the century up to a quarter of artisans and of smaller leaseholders may have been able to write. In the towns literacy was more widespread than in the countryside, though the ability to write a name was rare amongst the poorer inhabitants, and almost entirely absent in those who were female.

Literacy levels may have risen slowly in the first half of the 18th century. They undoubtedly grew more rapidly during the second half, and at the end of the century practically all larger leaseholders and most artisans and shopkeepers had reading and writing skills. Formalized school instruction had become more common and brought literacy into households unable to afford a private teacher, but dissemination further down the social scale proved difficult without a significant increase in school supply. This was met, in part, by the teacher proprietors of hedge schools. Their unregulated methods often elicited a hostile response, particularly from those who believed that popular education would aggravate social and political discontent. Yet the appeal of literacy could not be denied nor its dissemination prevented. Evangelical philanthropists and landlords extended patronage to teacher proprietors and to teaching congregations, though at a level hardly sufficient to keep pace with increasing demand in an expanding population. In the first two decades of the 19th century a swelling coalition of political and religious interests led to substantial levels of state support for such initiatives, and from 1831 the centrally regulated and locally managed national schools became the main conduit through which an increasing proportion of the population acquired elementary skills.

Literacy in 19th‐century Ireland may be measured by census data (from 1841), and, following compulsory civil registration of marriages from 1864, by the proportion of bridegrooms and brides who signed their name. Although the usefulness of both sets of data has been questioned, they indicate, at the very least, the availability and diffusion of minimal skill levels. Moreover the results in each case show a high degree of internal consistency, while the long‐term trend, sex differences, and patterns of regional variation revealed in both sets of data are broadly similar. In 1841 47 per cent of persons over 5 were returned by heads of household as able to read; by 1911 the proportion was 88 per cent. (Throughout the early modern period the ability to read was more widespread than the ability to write, particularly amongst women, and the 19th‐century census data revealed the persistence of that differential.) Sixty‐one per cent of grooms and 49 per cent of brides in 1864 were able to sign by writing their name; the disparity between men and women had gone by 1891, when 82 per cent of all spouses wrote their names. Thereafter marking of the register is rare and in 1931, when the data series ends, 98 per cent wrote their name. Census and marriage register data also help to confirm the view that the school was the principal means through which literacy was disseminated, though not the argument that it was its scole cause. In general, higher levels of school enrolment and higher literacy levels were strongly associated with the degree to which a region experienced urbanization, with higher incomes, and with the prevalence of English.

The adoption of a compulsory elementary school attendance policy in Northern Ireland in 1923 and in the Irish Free State in 1926 led to the widespread belief that basic literacy would very soon become universal. That assumption has been successfully challenged by educationists who have shown that, notwithstanding a compulsory state curriculum in reading and writing, literacy skill in adulthood is formed and modified by occupational and social need, and that in some groups, including linguistic minorities, travellers, and the urban poor, it is frequently present at a low level or absent altogether. The debate on the precise meaning of literacy continues, intensified by the development of new information technologies and the evolving forms of the spoken language in its different social contexts.

John Logan

literacy, the ability to read and write, is the measure usually taken as a key indicator of a country's economic and social advancement. Efforts by historians to pinpoint the exact level of literacy in Britain at any time have proved notoriously difficult, with estimates requiring further qualification by regional, gender, class, and rural/urban divisions, and by what level of literacy is meant. Estimates for mid-17th-cent. basic literacy, for example, range from 10 to 30 per cent of the population, with differences such as 15–20 per cent in the rural north, against 40–60 per cent in southern urban centres. The gender division is illustrated by one set of figures comparing 1841 and 1870, when a rise in male literacy of 67 per cent to 80 per cent was matched by a female rise from 51 per cent to 73 per cent.

The main early spurs to ‘useful literacy’ were religious or, later, economic, bringing strong associations with the protestant work ethic and the rise of industrial capitalism, whereby individuals sought literacy for their self-advancement, and capital (and eventually the state) encouraged it to create an educated literate work-force. These needs of the British capitalist nation state made education one of the first areas where the move from laissez-faire to intervention became evident. Through providing government assistance to voluntary institutions from the 1830s–1860s, and then intervening directly from 1870 with a series of Education Acts, the state mopped up most of the last traces of illiteracy.

While the agencies of the state made this undoubted contribution to the rise in literacy through education (serving also, according to the left, to extend a fair degree of ‘social control’), the role of working-class self-help should not be ignored. For every paternalistic Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, there was a working-class equivalent Society for the Diffusion of Really Useful Knowledge, challenging the reformist ideologies of the mechanics' institutes, adult schools, working men's colleges, people's palaces, and religious, scientific, and philosophical societies, with a contrasting co-operative, trade union, chartist, socialist (and latterly Marxist) ideology.

Consequently, some historians have estimated that of the 1840 population—before compulsory state schooling—most adults had some form of education (allowing for class and regional variations), with 75 per cent able to do some reading and 60 per cent some writing. Through the 20th cent., the expansion of the audio-visual media led to demands for education to concentrate on visual literacy as much as its traditional task of ensuring written literacy.

Douglas J. Allen

LITERACY TEST

LITERACY TEST refers to the government practice of testing the literacy of potential citizens at the federal level, and potential voters at the state level. The federal government first employed literacy tests as part of the immigration process in 1917. Southern state legislatures employed literacy tests as part of the voter registration process as early as the late nineteenth century.

As used by the states, the literacy test gained infamy as a means for denying the franchise to African Americans. Adopted by a number of southern states, the literacy test was applied in a patently unfair manner, as it was used to disfranchise many literate southern blacks while allowing many illiterate southern whites to vote. The literacy test, combined with other discriminatory requirements, effectively disfranchised the vast majority of African Americans in the South from the 1890s until the 1960s. Southern states abandoned the literacy test only when forced to by federal legislation in the 1960s. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act provided that literacy tests used as a qualification for voting in federal elections be administered wholly in writing and only to persons who had not completed six years of formal education. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 suspended the use of literacy tests in all states or political subdivisions in which less than 50 percent of the votingage residents were registered as of 1 November 1964, or had voted in the 1964 presidential election. In a series of cases, the Supreme Court upheld the legislation and restricted the use of literacy tests for non-English-speaking citizens. Since the passage of the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, black registration in the South has increased dramatically.

DennisIppolito/a. g.

See alsoCivil Rights Act of 1964 ; Primary, White ; Suffrage: Exclusion from the Suffrage ; White Citizens Councils .

lit·er·a·cy / ˈlitərəsē; ˈlitrə-/ • n. the ability to read and write. ∎  competence or knowledge in a specified area: wine literacy can't be taught in three hours.

Literacy Tests See Fifteenth Amendment; Vote, Right to.

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