Building a literate nation and public participation

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.