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Literacy is the ability to read and write. Broadly, literacy may be viewed as "particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing"[1] with the purpose of understanding or expressing thoughts or ideas in written form in some specific context of use.[2] In other words, humans in literate societies have sets of practices for producing and consuming writing, and they also have beliefs about these practices.[3] Reading, in this view, is always reading something for some purpose; writing is always writing something for someone for some purpose.[4] Beliefs about reading and writing and their value for society and for the individual always influence the ways literacy is taught, learned, and practiced.[5]
Some researchers suggest that the study of "literacy" as a concept can be divided into two periods: the period before 1950, when literacy was understood solely as alphabetical literacy (word and letter recognition); and the period after 1950, when literacy slowly began to be considered as a wider concept and process, including the social and cultural aspects of reading and writing[6] and functional literacy.[7][8]
Adult literacy rates, 2015 or most recent observation[9]
^Street, Brian (2001). "Introduction". Literacy and Development: Ethnographic Perspectives. London: Routledge. p. 11.
^Rowsell, Jennifer; Pahl, Kate (2020). The Routledge Handbook of Literacy Studies. Routledge. ISBN978-0-367-50172-3.
^Calvet, Louis-Jean (1999). Towards an Ecology of World Languages. Polity. ISBN978-0-745-62956-8.
^Lankshear, Colin; Knobel, Michelle (2007). "Sampling the 'New' in New Literacies". A New Literacies Sampler. New York: Peter Lang. p. 2. ISBN978-0-820-49523-1.
^Lindquist, Julie (2015). "Literacy". Keywords in Writing Studies. Logan: Utah State UP. pp. 99–102.