Adventure in Literacy Wonderland

Have a safe ride!

Literacy is my theme of my Fall 2009 because I'm taking two literacy related classes, which gives me the opportunity to take a closer look at the subject and to be honest, it's been interesting and inspiring to some extent. The fundamental question raised was what exactly literacy is. From the second language learning perspective, I find it easy to define because learning and teaching English in an EFL environment,which is where I have been, has made it simple where English literacy happens in classrooms, which is an isolated and decontextualized environment. However, I have always had the feeling that there's something missing in the picture. Students do well in the exams, including those standardized tests, such as TOEFL and GRE, however,they found themselves lost win an English speaking environment, which has happened to most cases. I have come to realize that what's missing is the social and cultural aspects of literacy in the curriculum. Literacy evolves with time and generations and across societies and cultures, which I think is best described in our reading this week, "literacy is described as a 'moving target' that will continually change according to what society expects from a literate person" (Kinzer & Leander, 2003, p547, cited in Schmidt & Gurbo, ). In results, we, as teachers/educators, are responsible to keep ourselves on top of the latest and our students in touch with different faces of literacy, especially for EFL language learners. I can't wait to take on this adventure in the literacy wonderland where I will explore the subject from different aspects and hopefully discover ways to help my students become literacy both in classrooms as well as in the real world.