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.