A key question emerging from the earlier International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS 1994) was the relationship between basic literacy skills and other skills thought to be important to workplace productivity and labour market success (OECD and Statistics Canada 2000, McAuley and Lowe 1999). In practice, ICT use is linked to literacy skills in a number of ways. Being skilled with most ICTs requires, to some degree, having literacy skills. By their very nature, ICTs both depend on and enhance communication abilities. Literacy skills are therefore essential to the development of digital literacy (Massé et al. 1998). One of the reasons is that ICT literacy includes not only technological proficiency, but also requires cognitive skills, such as those underlying reading and problem solving, which are critical to using ICTs effectively (International ICT Literacy Panel 2002). Much of the content of ICTs, notably of the Internet, remains text-based (Stewart 2000), and the format and content of web pages sometimes demands skills similar to those of document literacy. Further, it is likely that basic reading and writing literacy become more important as more information is transmitted and shared through ICTs than ever before (Leu Jr. 2000).

In general, the prose, document, numeracy and problem-solving skills of respondents increased as their perceived usefulness and attitude toward computers, diversity and intensity of Internet use, and use of computers for task-oriented purposes increased (see Chart 10 for an example of the association between prose literacy skills and computer use for task-oriented purposes). As literacy skills increased, the increases in diversity and intensity of Internet use and use of computers for taskoriented purposes were substantial; increases in perceived usefulness and attitude toward computers were moderate. These patterns generally held for all countries, with no exceptions. They also held true for other available measures of literacy (document literacy, numeracy and problem-solving) and, overall, concurred with those of another study where the more literate and numerate the respondent, the more likely they were to perform at high levels in an assessment of ICT skills (DfES 2003). Although aimed at a different age group, another study has found a positive relationship between access to home computers and reading skills among 15-year-old students (Bussière and Gluszynski 2004).

Chart 10. Use of computers for task-oriented purposes by prose literacy level, by country, 2003

Note: Countries are ranked by the index of computer use among respondents with prose literacy level 1.

Source: Veenhof, Clermont and Sciadas, 2005.