What is Literacy?

Having grown up without experiencing difficulty reading and with parents and teachers eager to teach me to read, I took literacy for granted. I really had never even thought of the process of teaching reading until I entered TE 301 and learned about all the steps and components of literacy. Within the last two years in my TE classes and in my field experience, I realized how much work it can actually take to learn or to teach someone how to read!

I thought I had it all figured out after TE 301: Literacy, for me, was the end goal of a step-by-step process of learning how to read. This included pronouncing phonemes, recognizing letters, concepts of print, and all these other pieces of the literacy process. After our discussion on 'What is Literacy?' and the readings concerning Literacy, though, I have come to realize that it is much more than that.

During class, when our group tried to come up with a definition for Literacy, it was actually more of a struggle than I had expected. A few of these working definitions included:
Literacy is...
...the ability to comprehend and assign meaning to language in various forms within different contexts.
...a tool to be used in the process of achieving success.
...both a necessity for basic functioning and as a tool to be used in the process of achieving goals.

These few definitions were found within our small group of five, so it was no surprise that when the other groups in class offered their definitions, there were many that overlapped, and at the same time, many had opposing ideas about the function of literacy.

Even Cambourne added a new component of literacy that I had not really thought about before: Conditions of Literacy Learning. This is to say that environmental factors are as important in learning to read as the steps in the process. Teachers and parents act as "provider[s] of literacy skills" and are necessary to support the learner. I found this very empowering as a future teacher and look forward to providing a supportive literacy environment in which my students feel wholly immersed in language and literacy in the classroom, as well as provides avenues for them to continue their literacy learning at home with their families.