Establishing a literate nation

Establishing a literate nation

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

Participating in modern society without literacy skills would
be impossible, and in order to achieve a certain level of
literacy, one needs to achieve a certain level of skill in the
spoken language. This issue was discussed in part two, and this
final part will focus on the issue of literacy.

The discussions presented earlier suggest that being literate
is the ability to participate in communication, both orally and
in writing.

Participating in written communication involves reading and
writing. This means that in reading, a person is actively
mobilizing one's background knowledge in order to negotiate or to
comprehend a text, and in writing, one needs to make use of the
same knowledge to create a text.

In other words, in order to create a piece of writing, a
person needs exposure to many examples of the style of writing
one is using.

Consequently, if we want our children to be able to write in
different styles or to create works of various genres when they
graduate from primary school, they need to be exposed to many
different styles; the styles generally expected by the community.

Children can be given writing exercises from the elementary
level, when children start to learn how to spell. In developing
these exercises, we need to think of a writing style that does
not demand complex organization requiring the use of different
cohesive devices, something familiar to every child.

For example, we can introduce a shopping list as a writing
exercise, which utilizes simple nouns and noun phrases to list
shopping items for the month.

This type of basic communicative exercise tends to be
overlooked by language educators who assume that children will be
able to complete such simple writing tasks automatically.

A keen literacy observer, however, would view the shopping
list exercise as an important step in the process of
internalizing several values.

First, is the value of communicating effectively in written
form, and raising awareness that a written list is helpful -- it
has the important function of reminding a person of what to buy,
and it also helps one to be efficient. Second, the shopping list
exercise helps the child to develop linguistic skills in
constructing noun phrases, especially if the list is in a foreign
language. Third, the shopping list exercise can help the child to
develop a sense of order or of systematic thinking, in that a
child can be taught to make the list in order of priority of the
goods, or in the order the shopping aisles are arranged in a
nearby supermarket.

Most importantly, children are exposed to written materials in
their everyday lives through such exercises at home, and not only
in relation to schoolwork.

From this basic writing style, children can slowly move to
more complicated styles that use complex structures, which they
might encounter both within and without the academic environment.

The above mentioned phrase, 'slowly move,' should be
interpreted as meaning that we must place emphasis on process in
order to reach the desired standards.

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

Compositional structures can be introduced before children
actually learn to read or write, that is, through listening to
children's stories read out loud by their parents or teachers.
Children who often have fairy tales read to them know what is
coming 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 phrases and sentences
again and again develops the child's sense of the characteristic
order of a narrative genre.

The process of listening, reading and writing regulates the
slow pace of creative writing since it involves trial and error,
editing, proofreading and so on. In this respect, the teacher's
job does not only involve giving a writing assignment and marking
it.

A teacher should, instead, guide the children throughout the
various stages of the creative process, from the planning up to
the proofreading stage, to ensure that every child will
eventually reach the desired writing standard, although each
individual child will have his or her own learning pace.

In this way, language education is not only interpreted as
language instruction, but also as literacy education, in the
sense that all subjects and skills introduced in the classroom
are relevant to the communication needs of children, and that
teachers help the children to become independent in their use of
language.

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

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