Building a literate nation (2)

Building a literate nation (2)

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

A modern culture is in a way characterized by a high
involvement of its people with literacy activities or involvement
with printed materials in order to carry out the day-to-day
business from the most casual contexts such as keeping shopping
dockets or reading all kinds of notices up to the highly formal
ones such as claiming tax return or filing legal cases.

For those who are brought up in a modern society, this kind of
situation seems to be ordinary because they are raised to face
and get involved in a highly literate culture in which many
standards are set based on literacy levels.

This means that in order to apply for a job, for example, one
will face a gatekeeping encounter that will test one's literacy
ability involving not only one's competence in written language,
but also his or her competence in spoken language.

A person's academic qualification remains important, but the
ability to communicate orally or in writing seems to be one of
the keys to obtaining jobs especially the respectable and well-
paid ones.

This phenomenon has now become obvious in Indonesia, a country
that has adopted a lot of systems created by modern countries
whose literacy education history dates back centuries ago.

As a 'young' country with a limited experience and rather
unclear orientation of literacy education, Indonesia has to
grapple with new realities that pose a lot of challenges to its
people especially regarding the issues that demand high level of
literacy ability.

Nowadays more and more people deal with literacy related
matters and the more modern a country becomes the higher literacy
level is demanded from its people.

This poses a serious challenge to the Indonesian language
education due to the fact that the Indonesian language needs to
continuously adjust itself to cater new types of communication
imposed by modernization.

The situation becomes even more complicated when it comes to
foreign language literacy, such as English, since the English
education goals are not explicitly formulated in terms of
literacy standards.

So far, the English language education is aimed at making
learners achieve communicative competence, but it has never been
clear what is meant by that especially at implementation level.

An alternative way of setting up the desired standards would
be looking at how English native children are linguistically
raised and how they, too, struggle in order to be effective
English communicators.

One cannot take for granted that the English communicate the
way they do simply because they are born in the English speaking
culture. Being in the target culture is one thing, but being an
effective communicator in that culture is quite another; it
requires a set of carefully planned language experiences that
shape learners in such a way that they are capable of
participating in the creation of English texts.

In Australia, where genre-based approach is used in literacy
education, text has become a central notion.

The underlying philosophy is that when one communicates, s/he
actually creates texts through stretches of clauses that make
sense.

The texts one produces can be in spoken and written forms and,
therefore, s/he is regarded as an effective communicator or a
literate person when s/he is able to participate in the creation
of various spoken and written texts.

With this ultimate goal of literacy education, language
learning processes are geared around learning experiences to
develop the desired values and attitudes, skills and knowledge.

The values and attitudes include, among other things,
developing learners' enjoyment in language and confidence and
independence as language users and learners.

Thus, from the earliest stage of literacy education children
are encouraged to interact with as many people as possible within
and outside the schools, to recite simple poems, to share stories
and personal experiences with the class etc. all of which require
knowledge and skills explicitly stated in the objectives.

In the process the children are made to notice what linguistic
and text features they need to attend to in creating different
texts.

These language performances of the children serve as
indicators whether or not the desired outcomes or standards have
been successfully achieved.

Consequently, assessments are also formulated and carried out
in terms of standards in the sense that all children are to reach
the same standards; some may achieve them faster or slower than
the others.

The question raised here is whether or not our Indonesian or
English language education has addressed the issue of making our
citizens competent and confident users of languages by setting up
clear literacy standards.

In order to consciously build a literate nation, a nation that
can communicate properly to solve its own problems and to
communicate with the rest of the world, a shift of paradigm from
language teaching to literacy education is urgently needed.

Modern countries have demonstrated that literacy education is
not only a concern of language educators; it is a major concern
of the whole nation.