The print material consulted for this review was provided by The Centre for Literacy. From their website (www.centreforliteracy.qc.ca), the reviewer used links to other organizations, including the National Adult Literacy Database (www.nald.ca), the Centre for Canadian Language Benchmarks (www.language.ca), LINCS (www.nifl.gov/lincs), the Center for Adult English Language Acquisition (www.cal.org/caela/) and the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE)(www.niace.org.uk). The reviewer concentrated on documents that addressed both ESL and Literacy. Papers that had only a peripheral concern with either topic are not included in this review.
The literature suggests that to date literacy is a concept with many definitions and categories, and there is no consensus on definition. A state of the field study published in 2006 by the Canadian Council on Learning (Quigley, Folinsbee & Kraglund-Gauthier), reviews various definitions used by agencies and organizations in Canada and in other industrialized countries. The most influential current definition in the industrialized world is the one used in the International Adult Literacy and Skills which is: “the ability to understand and employ printed information in daily activities at home, at work and in the community – to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential” (Statistics Canada and OECD, 2005, p. 280). Many Canadian literacy organizations use the IALS definition, or a variation of it (Quigley, Folinsbee & Kraglund-Gauthier, 2006). Since IALS is now the major official source of data on literacy in Canada, even organizations that have not necessarily adopted this definition still use it to some extent.
However, this definition is not universally accepted – many organizations prefer to use a broader definition. The Centre for Literacy, for example, defines literacy in relation to social and cultural context – what literacy means for a particular individual or community depends both on the demands made of them by the cultural context and on the social needs within that context (see www.centreforliteracy.qc.ca). The Ontario Literacy Council and the NWT Literacy Council (2005) are among other Canadian organizations that emphasize the cultural aspects of literacy (Quigley, Folinsbee & Kraglund-Gauthier, 2006).
This aspect is discussed by Jill Sinclair Bell (1995) in her paper “The Relationship between L1 and L2 Literacy”. While learning to be literate in Chinese script, Bell found that Chinese literacy meant something different from English literacy. Her Chinese literacy teacher stressed the importance of calligraphy, the need to proceed very slowly – perfecting one character before moving to the next (in Chinese, writing is an art.). Bell also observed a difference in learning styles: learning Chinese, she was expected to observe and digest, rather than analyse and comment. To Bell, this experience suggested that literacy is not ‘neutral’, but affected by class, gender, culture, ideology and ethnicity.