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.