ABSTRACT
The term literacy has come to be used to refer to an ever wider domain of activities, from media literacy and computer literacy to citizenship literacy, many of them only tangentially related to the traditional core of the concept of literacy, namely, reading. Even when confined to the domain of print, the term literacy is systematically ambiguous, in much the way words for literacy artifacts like book or poem are systematically ambiguous between reductionist and constructionist meanings. As Reddy (1979) pointed out many years ago, the word book can refer both to the physical object (it was a book of 300-plus pages, he used the book to prop open the window) and to the message or content, independent of its physical packaging (Kuhn’s book changed our view of science, I need a book that will keep me amused on a long plane ride). Somewhat analogously, literacy can be used to refer to the psycholinguistic capacity to read (Finnish high school students score first in the world in literacy, nationwide literacy assessments demanded by the president) as well as the social practices associated with reading (Guillaume’s impeccable taste and literacy amazed us all; youth literacy is threatened by MTV). Historical discussions of literacy, which contrasted it with orality and generated much discussion of the features that distinguished literate from oral modes of communication (see, e.g., Gee, 1988; Scollon & Scollon, 1981; Tannen, 1985; and many others), left unclear whether the personal, psychological, or the social, cultural sense of literacy was being invoked. Similarly, discussions concerning the cognitive consequences of literacy (e.g., Goody & Watt, 1963; Olson, 1977; Ong, 1977) fail in general to specify whether they are asking if cognitive consequences of literacy derive from becoming literate, in the individual, psycholinguistic sense of literate, or from access to literate cultures, in the social, constructivist sense of literate.
