What are literacy skills?

goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society‖ UNESCO, 2005:21. The Government of Nepal, in an effort to draw from Street ‘s ethnographic perspective of literacy and UNESCO ‘s cultural view of literacy, defined what a ―literate‖ person can do on the basis of daily life and his basic function in it in the context of Nepal as follows: ―A person who is able to read and write short and simple sentences related to daily life in hisher mother tongue or national language with understanding and who is able to communicate with others and perform simple tasks of calculation ‖ UNESCO and ACCU, 2003. 2.5 What are literacy skills? The National Early Literacy Panel NELP 30 classifies literacy skills into two concepts: EARLY LITERACY SKILLS and CONVENTIONAL LITERACY SKILLS NELP, 2009. The term CONVENTIONAL LITERACY SKILLS refers to necessary components of literacy such as decoding, oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, writing, and spelling. The term EARLY LITERACY SKILLS refers to precursor literacy skills which provide the launching pad for later literacy achievement. Early literacy skills are also referred to as PREDICTIVE , FOUNDATIONAL , or EMERGENT SKILLS . The NELP identified 30 In 2002, the National Early Literacy Panel NELP was appointed to examine the implications of instructional practices used with children from birth through age 5 in the USA, under the auspices of the National Center for Family Literacy. The NELP searched for more than 8,000 published scientific articles to screen in regard to its primary goal to identify interventions, parenting activities, and instructional practices that promote the development of childrens early literacy skills. Among them, approximately 500 research articles were used in the meta-analysis conducted by the panel to identify both correlations between children‘s early abilities and skills and later literacy development and the impact of instructional interventions on children‘s learning NELP, 2009:1-2. a total of eleven early literacy skills as follows: 1 Six early skills predictive of later literacy achievement • Alphabet knowledge AK – knowledge of the names and sounds associated with printed letters • Phonological awareness PA – the ability to detect, manipulate, or analyze the auditory aspects of spoken language including the ability to distinguish or segment words, syllables, or phonemes, independent of meaning • Rapid automatic naming of letters or digits – the ability to rapidly name a sequence of random letters or digits • Rapid automatic naming of objects or colors – the ability to rapidly name a sequence of repeating random sets of pictures of objects e.g., ―car,‖ ―tree,‖ ―house,‖ ―man‖ or colors • Writing or writing name – the ability to write letters in isolation on request or to write ones own name • Phonological memory – the ability to remember spoken information for a short period of time 2 Five early skills moderately predictive of later literacy achievement • Concepts about print – knowledge of print conventions e.g., left-right, front-back and concepts book cover, author, text • Print knowledge – a combination of elements of AK, concepts about print, and early decoding • Reading readiness – usually a combination of AK, concepts of print, vocabulary, memory, and PA • Oral language – the ability to produce or comprehend spoken language, including vocabulary and grammar • Visual processing – the ability to match or discriminate visually presented symbols. According to the NELP report, these 11 early literacy skills consistently predicted later literacy achievement for both preschoolers and kindergartners. However, Shanahan 2007:4 points out that while growth in all of these early literacy skills stimulates conventional literacy learning, it is also true that there is a reciprocal relationship between literacy and these skills: ―Students can begin to learn conventional literacy without fully mastering all of the precursor skills, and can even learn some of these precursor skills from literacy. ‖ Adams 1990 reviewed and analyzed various studies of basic reading and reading readiness capacities among young children. She emphasizes the necessity of rapid, effortless, and automatic word recognition skills as a critical element to skillful reading comprehension. She asserts that the knowledge of the letters of the alphabet and awareness of the corresponding speech sounds or phonemes are strong predictors of the ease or difficulty with which a child learns to read. Adams concludes about decoding skills in the following ibid.:416: ―In summary, deep and thorough knowledge of letters, spelling patterns, and words, and of the phonological translations of all three, are of inescapable importance to both skillful reading and its acquisition. ‖ Kudo and Bazan 2009:9-10 noted in their working paper for the World Bank that there are five critical skills of beginning reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and text comprehension. The summary of these 5 key elements of beginning reading skills and their test components are presented in Table 10: Table 10: Five key beginning reading skills Reading Skill Test component Phonemic awareness one-on-one oral test Students knowledge of how sounds make words Phonics one-on-one oral test 1 Letter Recognition: identifying letters of the alphabet by name; 2 Pseudo-word Decoding or Nonsense Words: knowledge of letter-sound correspondences as well the ability to blend letters together to form unfamiliar nonsense‖; 3 Word Reading: correctly identifying words in a sight-word list. Vocabulary oral or written test Asking a student 1 to provide a name for pictures expressive vocabulary, or to match spoken words with pictures receptive vocabulary; 2 to provide a word that best matches a definition presented verbally by the teacher expressive vocabulary; to provide a definition to a word receptive vocabulary; 3 to select a word that does not belong in a group of words; 4 to provide a synonym or an antonym for words; and so on. Fluency one-on-one-test To ask a student to read a passage aloud for one minute to examine the students oral reading fluency rate. Reading comprehension 1 Question answering: For each passage read, students provide answers to short- answer questions, which could be literal factual questions about the text, inferential making logical connections among facts in text or drawing from ideas implicit in the text, or critical using analysis or making value judgments about what was read. 2 Passage recall: requiring students to retell the story in their own words after reading it putting a time limit to this process, such as four or five minutes. 3 Cloze or maze: filling in missing words from a passage. 4 Asking students to read sentences and state whether they make sense or not. Source: Kudo Bazan, 2009 Based on the goals in literacy acquisition of Lee 1982:15, Matthews et al. 2003 31 abridged the definition of literacy skills as follows: ―Literacy skills are those skills which enable a learner to read and write with independence, comprehension and fluency. ‖ They also illustrated various kinds of literacy skills as shown in Table 11: Table 11: Literacy skills Literacy skills Definition Example Reading Readiness skills The ability necessary for a person to begin the process of learning to read. Aural phonemic awareness Teaching someone to handle a book correctly Using a pencil correctly Understanding and interpreting illustrations Discerning shapes Understanding the alphabetic principle Understanding some concepts and conventions of print Fluency skills The ability to see larger segment and phrases as wholes as Immediately recognizing letters and frequent clusters of letters Learning frequent words by sight 31 Delle P. Matthews, Trudy K. Stewart, and Leah B. Walter 2003 contributed to summarize various literacy skills concisely in the LinguaLinks Library 5.0, the software developed by SIL International to aid linguistic data collection and publishing. The directory is Lingua Links ＼Library＼CWEdition＼ Litera50 nfo ＼Literacy Bookshelf＼Glossary of literacy terms＼Glossary Literacy:L＼What are literacy skills? Literacy skills Definition Example an aid to reading and writing more quickly with a minimum of effort. Seeing phrases as wholes Using prediction skills within the phrase or clause Reading skills Specific abilities which enable a reader - to read the written form as meaningful language - to read anything written with independence, comprehension and fluency, and - to mentally interact with the message Word attackdecoding skills – the ability to convert graphic symbols into intelligible language Seeing the component parts of words Blending these parts into new words Recognizing syllable patterns Recognizing symbols for consonantvowel sounds Recognizing symbols for tone and other suprasegmental features Recognizing punctuation and space Using the above skills simultaneously with comprehension and critical reading skills Comprehension skills – the ability to use context and prior knowledge to aid reading and to make sense of what one reads and hears Understanding that print conveys meaning Using context as an aid to reading Using prior knowledge as an aid to reading Using predictability as an aid to reading Fluency skills – the ability to see larger segments, phrases, and groups of words as wholes Critical reading skills – the ability to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize what one reads. They are the ability to see relationships of ideas and use them as an aid in reading. Seeing questions and expecting answers Seeing cause and effect Seeing steps in a process Seeing comparisons Seeing generalization and itemization Writing skills Specific abilities which help writers put their thoughts into words in a meaningful form and to mentally interact with the message Comprehensibility skills Understanding that writing is communicating messages or information. Fluency skills Recognizing the linear sequence of sounds Mastering writing motions and letter shapes Recognizing the chunking of words Recognizing the need for space between words Writing quickly Literacy skills Definition Example Creativity skills The ability to write freely anything the learner wants to write Numeracy A mastery of the basic symbols and processes of arithmetic Numbers Addition subtraction Simple multiplication division Simple weights and measures Money counting Telling time Reading calendar Source: Glossary of literacy terms in the LinguaLinks library

2.6 Performance levels of adult literacy