VET
Time to tackle tertiary literacy
Many students have insufficient language skills for study – and not just because they’ re from overseas. By Stuart Middleton
It never ceases to make me wonder whether we have become daft when I see constant references to this or that kind of“ literacy”.
We see that“ financial literacy” is needed by those who struggle with money – actually this seems largely to be a euphemism for“ managing without much money”. To use computers well you must be“ computer literate” by being steeped in“ digital literacy”.
In fact the web tells me there are myriad varieties of literacy: scientific literacy, cultural literacy, mathematical literacy( this could be numeracy, perhaps), global literacy, visual literacy, media literacy.
And thus it all becomes clear: having literacy no longer means being literate in the old sense of the word. A literate person was one who could read and write – long ago, this meant a little bit of both; these days, the expectation is that these skills will be at a high level. It was once the purpose of schooling to make people literate and that of tertiary education to make people elegantly literate.
Now,“ literate” and“ literacy” simply mean being able to do something, or knowing about it or having learnt the appropriate behaviour.
It is a simple truth that those who can read, write and be articulate can tackle most things. Literate people – genuinely literate – have the tools to be good at all those other things without too much initiation into the secret societies of managing money, working a computer, getting along with others and seeing through the media. If our education system was turning out literate people across the board, because it clearly does this with many young people, it would not be necessary to add the complications of all those spin-off varieties.
Of course, each new literacy that comes along creates another area of specialism that protects the turf, and this might be behind the tendency to see each area of knowledge and activity as a“ literacy”.
For a period of my life I had a block
38 | March 2013 of land where I kept sheep, bred ducks, had an orchard, grew flowers and vegetables, and had all the other trappings of‘ the good life.’ My neighbour would laugh at me, saying:“ You’ re always reading a book to find out how to do something.” He never understood the pleasure that this observation brought to me. Of course I would do this – a literate person uses the tools of their literacy to acquire further knowledge.
And there’ s the rub. As access to tertiary education expands, there is growing evidence that increasing numbers of students are arriving ill-prepared for the tasks that face them. This is not to say that they are illiterate, but that they have not developed the skills of literacy to a point where they meet the demands of study at university level.
So tertiary institutions have to accept that they are increasingly in the business of literacy, and get on with deciding how this is going to be tackled.
Early responses saw the establishment of learning centres and academic assistance programs, but these carry with them the issue of relating what is being taught to what needs to be learnt. The best of such approaches are adequate but no substitute for delivering elements of literacy development right inside the courses. Embedded literacy is the current favoured approach.
It’ s not a new idea. Remember the language-across-the-curriculum approaches developed in the 1960s? They spawned a whole lot of books and programs focused on English for academic uses. Some of these may have worked, but you can’ t cope with issues that have become mainstream by clipping stuff on at the edges.
Presenting even more of a challenge is the change in student demographics, with increasingly diverse ethnic backgrounds and an exponential increase in international students in classrooms, for some of whom English is not a first language. Bi-literacy is another kind of literacy to consider – being literate in two languages – though to a very large extent being literate in one language transfers to the skills of literacy in another, provided that the other language has a presence in the teaching setting.
Students seeking to understand a second language continually ask themselves the question:“ In what ways is this new language the same as or different from the language I already know?” Having teachers and tutors who have facility in the languages students bring into the classroom helps with this. You do not learn English as a second language by ignoring the first language! We are very slow to recognise this, and it is as much an issue for tertiary as it is for school education.
There has long been a saying among linguists:“ If you speak many languages you are multilingual; if you speak two languages you are bilingual; if you speak one language you are English.” Issues of multiple languages do seem to trouble education systems in the English-speaking West rather more than they do others.
Psychologist Lev Vygotsky put it nicely:“ Thoughts are not merely expressed in words but come into being through them.” If our education institutions are in the business of increasing the capacity to think, then they have to accept that they are in the business of language development – at all levels and across all disciplines. n
Stuart Middleton is director of external relations at the Manukau Institute of Technology, New Zealand.