Rosamond Adult Literacy - Mentored Reading, Writing, and Computer Literacy.
Literacy in...
Reading
Whether its reading for pleasure or reading for life, knowing how to read is taken for granted by many of us. A restaurant menu,
instructions on a medicine bottle, the rules of a board game, the t.v. guide, are just a few of the items that we read often. But what do
you do if you can't read these?
Well, we're here to help. Please contact us today if you need help in
any of these areas. We'd love to hear from you..
Writing
Second to speaking, we frequently communicate by writing. Years past it was letters to family and friends, holiday cards, and the wedding or party invitation. These days the preferred method is through email or texting. Spelling is key to good writing skills. They go hand in hand with grammar and punctuation.
Technology Skills
Basic PC Commputers, Microsoft Office, Email.
Literacy skills with the computer are just as vital as reading and writing. Parts of the computer, hardware, software, email, point and click, cut and paste, short cuts, the keyboard, the mouse, CD's, DVD's, flash drives, and new terms are added all the time.
Why does it matter?
Aside from quality-of-life concerns, the impact of low literacy skills correlates with a number of social and economic issues:
- Poverty
- Welfare
- Income
- Employment
- Crime
- Health
- Voter participation
Did you know...
About one-and-a-half billion (1,500,000,000) people spoke English at the start of the 21st century. That was one quarter (¼) of all people on earth. More than 400 million (400,000,000) speak English as their first language. The rest speak English as a second or third language for their professional and personal lives
Source: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language
Literacy Overview
Traditionally, literacy has been defined in terms of being able to read and write at very basic levels. For many years there was a sense that low literacy skills among adults was a nationwide problem. However, despite this awareness, there was little data available to support this contention.
In 1998, the U.S. Congress instructed the Department of Education to conduct a survey aimed at assessing the literacy levels of American adults. In 1993, the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) was released and changed the way literacy was defined.
Congress in its 1991 National Literacy Act, defined literacy this way:
An individual's ability to read, write, and speak in English, and compute and solve problems at levels of proficiency necessary to function on the job and in society, to achieve one's goals, and develop one''s knowledge and potential.
The NALS study reflected this new vision of literacy to include problem-solving and higher reasoning skills. The new view said that literacy was not the goal, but the means by which people could reach their individual goals. Literacy, then, is a tool for people to use reading and writing to improve quality of life.
A simple way to say this is that the focus became a matter of functional literacy, or to promote the ability to read and write well enough to function indepently in society.
