Functional Literacy: North-South Perspectives

Abstract

Can we postulate that a line of distinction could be drawn between developing and developed countries with regard to the functionality of prevailing literacies? The multilayered perception of literacy and the interpretive ambiguity surrounding functionality, in addition to the lack of focused treatment of the issue in the literature, complicate such an attempt considerably. Functionality can be referred to as a moving range to be located and periodically relocated on the illiteracy-literacy continuum. Two notions are found to be of interest in this analysis: restricted literacy in the sense used by Goody; and functional penetration, referred to by Levine as the range of activities and transactions in which literacy is institutionalized for a human group.