Action 1.17: Illiteracy, Literacy and Social Inequality
Payne, G. (2006) Recounting 'illiteracy': literacy skills in the sociology of social inequality. In Solar, J., Fletcher-Campbell, F. & Reid, G. (2009) Understanding Difficulties in Literacy Development: Issues and Concepts. London, Sage.
Terms already encountered:
- Functional literacy - low levels of literacy/numeracy for tackling specific social tasks - social definition
- Moser (1999)- tested domains (prose, document, usage, numeracy) in 'real-life' material
- New Literacy Studies
New ideas
- Post modernism led to social perspective
- Reaction to NLS (Brandt & Clinton, 2002)
- Literacy not investigated in sociological research
- Moral panic over literacy rates
- Formal qualifications determine entry to middle class occupations
- Normative literacy - literacy presented as skill of concerned citizen, responsible member of the community, useful employee - deficit view
- Adult = 16-65 (working age); limited info on gender or ethnicity