Building a Literate Nation

Building a Literate Nation

Helena I. R. Agustien, Ph.D
Lecturer, Post Graduate Program
Universitas Negeri Semarang
Semarang

In part one of this article, it was indicated that
participating in modern lives without literacy skills would be
impossible, and that in order to achieve certain level of
literacy skills one needs to achieve certain level of oracy
skills. The oracy issue was discussed in part two, and this last
part will take up the literacy issue.

The previous discussions suggest that being literate is being
able to participate in communication both oral and written.

Participating in written communication involves reading and
writing which means that, in reading, a person is actively
mobilizing her/his background knowledge in order to negotiate or
comprehend a text, and in order to write s/he needs to make use
of the same knowledge to create a text.

In other words, in order to create a piece of writing, one
needs to get exposed to a lot of examples of the text type one is
dealing with.

Consequently, if we want our children to write different text
types or genres when they graduate from primary schools, they
need to be exposed of a lot of examples of text types in the hope
that they will write according to the expected styles; the styles
desired by the community at large.

The exercise of writing can start from a very elementary level
when children start to know how to spell words.

We need to think of a genre that does not demand a complex
organization requiring different kinds of cohesive devices; that
one that every child can cope with.

We can introduce, for example, a mother's shopping list
containing of nouns and noun phrases representing the shopping
items for the month.

This simple communicative event tends to be overlooked by
language educators who think that our children will be able to do
it automatically anyway.

A keen literacy observer, however, would see shopping list
writing as an important process in the effort of internalizing
several values.

First, the value of communicating effectively in written form
giving the sense that a written list is helpful; it has an
important function to remind a person what to buy; it helps one
to be efficient. Second, it helps the child develop linguistic
skills in constructing noun phrases especially if the list is in
a foreign language.

Third, a shopping list can develop a sense of order or system
in that a child can be taught to write the list in a priority
order or in the order of the isles of the nearby supermarket.

Most importantly, children are exposed to written materials in
their everyday lives, not only when they have to do school-
related works.

From this simple genre, children can slowly move to more
complicated genres having more complex structures they might
encounter in and out the school domains.

The phrase 'slowly move' above should be interpreted as
emphasizing process to reach the desired standards.

The standards meant here are the standards of written language
usually characterized by more established text structures
(compared to those of spoken language), lexical density, writing
conventions etc.

The introduction of text structures can start before children
actually learn to read or write, that is, when they listen to
children's stories read by their mothers or teachers.

Children familiar with fairy tales would know what is going to
come next when a person reads Once upon a time ...and what to
expect when the story comes to the sentence ... and they lived
happily ever after.

Hearing these kinds of phrase and sentence again and again
would develop the children's sense of order characterizing a
narrative genre.

The process covering listening, reading and writing is what
makes text production proceed in a slow pace since it involves
trial and error, editing, proof reading and so on.

In this respect, the teacher's job is not only giving a
writing assignment and marking it.

A teacher should guide the children throughout the stages of
the creative processes from planning up to proofreading so that
every child will eventually reach the desired standard although
some children might reach the standard faster or slower than the
others.

In this way language education is not only interpreted as
language instruction, but also literacy education in the sense
that whatever teachers introduce in the classes are relevant to
the children's communication needs and the teachers help the
children to be independent language users.

This article suggests that language education in Indonesia
adopt a literacy perspective in the sense that language
education's goals are geared around the communicative competence
standards required by modern societies.

Since being modern often means being literate, and since
without sufficient literacy level our citizens will not be able
to cope with modern communication demands, it is important that
we redefine our language education in order to build a literate
nation.