Szwed explained that literacy is divided into five main elements which include text, context, functions participants, and motivation. On the textual basis Szwed defined texts as exactly what people read and write. Reading for example is achievable through library circulation figures, publishers’ sales figure and questionnaires (Bloome et al., 2018). However, publishers haven’t come to an agreement on what exactly is a book since even magazines are still considered as books. Furthermore, scholars today mostly debate on classes about fictional and non-fictional classes sine beyond the judgements involved it takes little judgement to think up artistic uses functional literature and functional uses of artistic writing.
Szwed recommends the use of questionnaires and social survey instruments since any instrument that will be used to gather the necessary information will require to have all of the varieties of texts, contexts, and functions that we need in order to properly guide the interviewers into answering the questions asked precisely. Compared to written forms, written forms assume a certain standard of literary, and this standard of literary is the one that is required (bloome et al., 2018).
Szwed means that we need to investigate reading and writing as activities that have consequences peoples lives, work patterns, economic conditions, patterns of leisure and complexity of other factors. Meaning one must consider of the readers activities in tranvaluing and reinterpreting them.
By using ethnographies to greatly expand knowledge on literacy. This will mainly be achieved through field observations or through interviews where the subjects have control over what is said. In this way, we can learn more about why and how individuals use literacy in their everyday lives. Also, Id examines the literacy levels of the students and what material they choose to read.
Socio cultural perspective is basically an asset used to examine literacy as an artifact. Characteristics of literacy include Semiotic- this is where students read from alphabets text as well as photos, graphs, illustrations, and video. Literacy is also public which meant reading and writing in classrooms wasn’t private. Literacy is also transitory which means the written and written text are dynamic considered ever changing. Literacy is also product oriented when creating artifacts to communicate to specific audience (Baker 2018).
Literacy is basically the ability to read and write while orality is the basically the medium of communication used by communities with no knowledge of writing. But its also unclear whether literacy can be defined through reading and writing. However, in orality, there’s no such thing as cultural orality since some characteristics of the cultural literates has also been seen among the cultural orals too (Gintsburg 2021).
Communities shape literature according to the changes in culture. This basically means the nature of literacy changes with changes I the culture. Resnik and Resnick 1997 postulate that late in the 1600 someone who read a range of specific religious text was considered literate but later in the 1700 literacy was narrowed down to mostly specific familiar texts. In the 1900 however literacy was considered as simply understanding or getting the gist of articles newspapers and written down (Baker 2018).
Standards of literacy can be created through Writing habits where by one can make errors when writing their own texts compared to when writing for others. Literacy standards can also be created through elaborate system of status communication where one isn’t directly responsible of their own communication in written form (Bloome et al., 2018). It commonly serves individuals who acquire them in a progression of steps which cannot be varied or avoided in learning and its mainly offered buy advertising, logos and store signs