INTRODUCTION

Definitions of Literacy

Literacy is a basic requirement for participation in educational, vocational and other community activities. Definitions of literacy developed in the past decade have become more unified and comprehensive and, as such, are becoming more and more relevant as society becomes more knowledge and information based. A common definition of literacy used by many organizations today is:

Literacy includes the basic skills of reading, writing, and numeracy as well as computer skills and the ‘soft skills’ of leadership, problem solving, critical thinking, conflict resolution and communication with co-workers and customers in the workplace.

Learning@WORK website, (1999) http://www3.sk.sympatico.ca/liters/

In the Statistics Canada report (1996) Reading the Future, based on the findings from the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), literacy is defined as “the ability to understand and use written information to function in society, to achieve goals, and to develop knowledge and potential”(p. 4). This definition further divides the concept into three sub-types:

1. Prose literacy: the ability to understand and use information from texts, including labels, pamphlets and media articles.
2. Document literacy: the ability to identify and utilize information from a variety of formats including charts, tables, graphs and maps.
3. Quantitative literacy: the ability to identify and manipulate numbers from a variety of formats using text instruction.

The Western Canada Workplace Training Network (1996) identified five levels of literacy for each of these sub-types (i.e. prose, document and quantitative types):

Level 1 indicates very low literacy skills, where the individual may, for example, have difficulty identifying the correct amount of medicine to give a child from the information found on the package.

Level 2 respondents can deal only with material that is simply, clearly laid out and in which tasks involved are not too complex. This is a significant category, because it identifies people who may have learned to use their lower literacy skills in everyday life, but who would have difficulty learning new job skills requiring a higher level of literacy.

Level 3 is considered as the minimum desirable threshold in many countries but some occupations require higher skills.

Level 4 and 5 show increasingly higher literacy skills requiring the ability to integrate several sources of information or solve complex problems.