Literacy in Adult Life: Community, Further Education and Work

Abstract

In the past it was assumed that people learned to read and write at school and that was the end of the matter. The belief was that school-based literacy skills would enable people to move on to and participate in further education and the workplace. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, researchers (for example, Barton, Hamilton & Ivanič 2000, Barton & Ivanič 1991, Baynham 1995, Clark and Ivanič 1997, Hamilton, Barton & Ivanič 1994, Heath 1983) began to turn their focus to the social purposes and practices of literacy in contexts beyond the school, including tertiary education contexts, home contexts, community contexts and work contexts. These socially oriented researchers began to investigate ‘the different literacies associated with different domains of life’ (Barton et al. 2000: 11) and this led to an interest in how adults managed in different contexts with varying levels of literacy skills and how these could be measured (for example, Black 1989, Wickert 1989).