Last month, there was a thread about the meaning of illiteracy. What seems to be the case is that there are a large number of people in the US who are adults but read and write English on, say, a third grade level or a fifth grade level. There is the concept that a person’s literacy increases generally during their primary school years, so for example the average sixth grader is “more literate” than their average third grade little sister.
What is the highest level of literacy in a language that can be reached and defined meaningfully as a “level” of literacy? It seems to me that a native English speaker with a bachelor’s degree from an English speaking school has more or less topped out their literacy abilities. Further study such as a master’s or doctoral degree increases their subject matter knowledge and research skills, but it doesn’t make them more literate in general - or does it? Once you’ve reached the college level, you are expected to have sufficient research skills to be able to look up unfamiliar vocabulary terms or grammar usages that you might encounter in a primary source, textbook, or academic journal and more or less proceed without tutoring in basic language.
Is the average physician with a Doctor of Medicine degree more literate, on average, than a librarian with a Master of Library Science degree? Somehow I doubt that.
Are there programs or practices that increase a native speaker’s literacy beyond that of a university educated person?
Maybe those of you who know more about what “literacy” really means can comment.
Searching for “highest level of literacy” returns results that talk about areas of the world where the largest percentage of people have reached some baseline level of literacy. That’s not what I’m talking about.
“Literate” in that they can read well or “literate” in that they have wide ranging knowledge of a subject area and can absorb and relay information about what they are discussing effectively.
I’m not sure. Like the OP in the thread I linked too, I’m not sure what the true definitions are. But for the sense of “literate” meaning “being able to read well”, at what point does that top out? Are there tests or other evaluative instruments that can distinguish reading ability beyond high school? How high does it go? For example, you can be academically evaluated to read at a fifth grade level or a sixth grade level, or possibly at a tenth or eleventh grade level. How many “levels” above that does the scale go?
Does reading and writing ability become so intermixed with academic research skills and subject matter knowledge (e.g. knowledge of quantum physics, pharmacology, or music theory) after high school that it becomes meaningless for a person to have a specific and separate level of literacy? E.g. can you say that John reads really well but doesn’t know squat about algebra, physics, literature, or medicine, but that Mary knows a lot about all those things and is also an accomplished historian but she can’t read for squat?
Winning a national Scrabble tournament would be a pretty good indicator of being as literate as you possibly could be.
Or you might not only be an American professor who teaches just about every subject in your college’s curriculum, but you’re also fluent in Greek, Latin, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac: Joshua Chamberlain - Wikipedia
For example, could you take all Full Professors at Harvard that teach English Literature and that have a PhD in English Literature and rate them from best to worst in terms of English language reading comprehension skills, or would that be meaningless because they would be almost certain to get so close to a perfect score on your literacy test that there is no statistically significant difference that is reasonably measurable? How about professors of Physics or Law?
Probably not. Winning a Scrabble tournament requires knowledge of the existence of a large number of obscure words, but nothing at all about understanding their meaning or usage. A better measure would be something like writing a critically-acclaimed novel. Or, for that matter, being one of the critics who’s doing the acclaiming.
I’d say that having a broad vocabulary is a part of literacy, but simply memorizing large numbers of words that you can’t correctly use or maybe even pronounce is getting a bit away from skills that increase a person’s useful literacy level in my opinion. You could have an autistic savant who has memorized half of the Oxford English Dictionary and can quote definitions and etymologies but gets confused by Tom Sawyer. Sheer vocabulary size might be one metric that could be used alongside comprehension tests (e.g. read this short story about a family and tell me the name of the old man’s sister), and perhaps writing tests (e.g. read this article on HIV research and write a paragraph summarizing its contents) if you are treating writing literacy as necessarily intermixed with reading literacy.
As a full professor of English Lit. (not at Harvard, though), I can tell you that the problem would be who you have grading the literacy exam and what the reading sample consists of. I’m trained in contemporary lit. and creative writing, and I can assure you that certain colleagues of mine, say the ones trained in literary theory, think very little of my ability to read in literary theory, while my estimation of their ability to analyze, say, a contemporary poem, is likewise low. When the department argues over a neutral text (the bylaws of our Department), sparks frequently fly when one professor disagrees with another as to the meaning of a certain phrase; they often pull their dicks out and insist that the size of their prodigious whangers (metaphorically speaking, of course) settles the issue of textual interpretation.
Literacy is going to be far more than knowing about the existence of words and spelling them correctly as in Scrabble.
Punctuation and grammar would be vital, along with correct vocabulary usage within context.
After that, you then have to decide where cultural aspects are going to be significant and this is likely to be complicated by the audience being addressed - an English readership will place different levels of importance on the turn f a word compared to Americans.
Once you have decided all those levels of competence, there comes artistry and novel usage - that’s where awards may be won and lost, hence great literary prizes.
So how would you weight all these in order of critically essential through to essentially critical?
Really interesting and really to the point. If you can’t design a literacy test or other form of evaluation that demonstrates content and construct validity, then you can’t really say that “Professor Jones is more literate than Professor Smith because Jones got an 34 on the literacy test and Smith got a 27”, and so the whole idea of determining who is more literate fails.
Are there actual literacy tests that rate a person beyond the twelfth grade or beyond an undergraduate level? E.g. a test where so called “functionally illiterate” people score in a range from the bottom to “fifth grade level”, and literature professors and other well-read people consistently score at the highest level, which is “five steps beyond twelfth grade”, with undergraduates and grad students typically scoring anywhere between “twelfth grade” and “five steps beyond twelfth grade”?
Literacy is not just about reading. Even if you limit yourself to written English, literacy is the ability to read, write, and think critically about what is written. Literacy in a given culture also includes all of the symbol systems used in that culture, so that a fully literate American should be able to read and analyze an essay, a map, or a balance sheet with equal facility.
What would such a literacy test be measuring? It’s surely not just recognising words, but more concepts. It all gets highly technical, pretty quickly, at the level of distinction you seem to be talking about. Who is more literate: the woman who can critique a text using her knowledge of Marx and viewed through the body of modern feminist thought, or her sister who publishes papers while running a major experiment at CERN?
If you think of literacy as a “journey”, the first part is obvious: you want to be able to read signs, newspapers, books intended for a general audience etc. And the literacy levels chart these first few steps. After that, many options are available to you, so it’s not so obvious what levels would mean.
Yes. There is more or less a measurable progression from someone who has no knowledge of the alphabet to someone who can recognize some letters to someone who can recognize all letters to someone who can sound out simple words but has poor recognition to someone who can recognize most simple words to someone who can read basic sentences to someone who can read complex sentences and write simple ones to someone who can read and write complex sentences to someone who can write 5-paragraph essays (a favorite of my high school teachers) to someone who can read university level materials and write a thesis. Adults who have trouble with literacy can go get tested by Adult Education departments and assigned a place on the scale and sent for the correct lessons.
Where does the scale end? Is it high school graduation? E.g. a person can be tested to determine if they read at the level of a high school graduate or not, and if they do not, they can be place in appropriate classes, but if they are tested as reading at at least the level of a high school graduate, they cannot be further quantified as reading at a college sophomore level, college graduate, first semester graduate student, or all-but-dissertation PhD candidate because the definition of literacy expands so broadly?
As some have already mentioned, at high levels of literacy you get into being able to read very specialised material, e.g.,
contemporary poetry
legal materials such as statutes and regulations
advanced research documents, such as journal articles, where the subject domain matters (reading pure mathematics is very different from reading academic sociology).
And people tend to specialise a lot. For example, a person who is a top-level expert at reading United States statutes and regulations may not be at the top level in reading United Kingdom statutes and regulations: they won’t be so familiar with the specific context, such as the decisions of the U.K. courts. And a professor of Australian literature may not be such an expert in reading contemporary Canadian poetry, because the cultural references will be less familiar.
IELTS tests English Language ability in non-native speakers. It has Reading and Writing sections. The highest level is 9. Many colleges/universities require 7s for admission.