My Literacy Essay --Finally :)

My Initial Concept of Literacy

Literacy from my experience in school and with others has typically meant the ability to read and write. We say a person is ‘literate’ if they are able to express themselves effectively through written communication. Likewise people are not literate if they are not able to communicate in such a way. When students enter a classroom the teacher and other students judge their aptitude based partly on this notion of communicative ability. It is funny that traditionally literacy is more at work in classes like literature and language arts. When a student steps into a math class and is asked to examine and calculate numerical values the concept of literacy is sort of forgotten.
So it occurs to me that literacy as a term has limits. But it has always fascinated me that the concept of literacy goes a bit further. What I mean is that we use phrases like ‘computer literate’ which have nothing to do with reading or writing. The definition here is more about functionality or competency. When we say a person is computer literate, we don’t mean that they are able to read and write about computers, we mean they are able to successfully navigate the computer world. So perhaps literacy means the same and has more broad aspects. Even still we don’t typically say a person is ‘math literate’, but we can definitely acknowledge when a student is gaining mastery of one subject over another. In these cases the term literacy doesn’t really come up. Since I am on the linguistics track within the English major I am very much interested to see how the term or even the concept of literacy is used practically within our social and cognitive constructs, and how it is prescriptively taught through various institutions. I wonder and imagine that there may be some tension between the practical use of this concept and the way it is presented to learners.