Literacy
Literacy in brief, is the ability to comprehend writing in a given language and to transmit concepts in writing in that language.
Literacy is important because it is required to make inexpensive mass education available. Once a significant portion of the population is literate, inexpensive media and organizations such as pamphlets, public lending libraries, newspapers and magazines can perform mass education. Since reading is the classic way to educate oneself, a literate person's opportunities are expanded in every art and science.
However, literacy directly affects public welfare, as well as private interests.
The most important single effect of literacy is probably on public health education. Public health institutions normally have such small budgets that they can reliably deliver health informaiton only to literate people.
Literate persons can also pursue more wealth-generating oportunities. For example, they can read newspaper advertisements for workers, or crop prices, and self-train for better-paying professions, or read about better techniqes in their professions. Wealth improves almost every other area of life.
It's well established that government is the most dangerous institution, having caused more deaths than any other. Therefore, tools that help people organize to affect policy contribute to public safety. Literacy allows persons to form more types of political organizations. Literate people need not be present to express their opinions- they can write letters or organize petitions. Literate people can usually vote, while illiterate people often cannot, or feel intimidated by the process.
Teaching Literacy
Some of the most effective methods of teaching literacy involve direct instruction of simplified phonetic systems.
In English, for example, the Distar system developed by the RAND Corporation has been adapted into a simple literacy instruction manual ("Teach your Child to Read in 100 Lessons") that permits a literate adult to teach an illiterate child by simply reading and following instructions. All of the complex instructional lesson design, skill building and optimal repitition and review have been "canned" in the book's instructional design.
A computer program is even available (from Roberta Pournelle at http://www.jerrypournelle.com) that uses a similar system, but directly pronounces and tests the lessons, eliminating the need for a literate adult.
Comprehensive phonic programs exist, based on such systems as the Orton phonogramic system, whcih was originated to teach brain-damaged veterans to read again. Using the 73 Orton phonograms and 14 spelling rules, 50,000 English words can be accurately pronounced and spelled with only 23 exceptional words. Although quite hard to learn, and far more exacting to teach, such systems provide students with powerful basic language skills.
A key technique in many comprehensive phonic systems is a spelling copybook, a sort of personal dictionary in which a student keeps a personal alphabetized bestiary of words for review. The copybook usually shows how the word is pronounced, accented and syllabized, and how standard spelling rules are invoked to determine its conventional spelling.
Several learning styles challenge conventional literacy programs. Visual and auditory learners often do well with conventional curricula. Kinesthetic learners often do well to use a copybook, less classroom practice and dictation, and more pencil practice, with a collection of magnetized letters and a steelboard to manipulate word-roots, prefixes and suffixes.
The degree of comprehension of course varies from person to person, and so the conditions for a certain state of "literacy" differ depending on who is defining the standard. For one attempt to define a standard of literacy, see [1].
Literacy Readiness
It is well-established that children become able to "blend sounds" at different ages. Thus phonetic systems often cannot be applied by very young children.
Experts differ in their approach to this issue, some advocating a delayed, but more rapid acquisition of reading by means of phonetics, while others advocate early acquisition of a basic vocabulary through a "see and say" method.
A secondary advantage of phonetics is that it improves readers' spelling and writing abilities. See and say methods are said to increase the word acquisiton rate and reading speed of many students.
While young children often require several hundred hours of instruction, spread over much of a year, motivated adults using a good instructional method can often acquire basic literacy with forty or fewer hours of instruction.
"According to UNESCO statistics, almost a billion illiterates remain as we approach the year 2000." [2]