Filling in the Literacy Gap

Li: Week 13

This week we read Li’s (2001) article, “Literacy as situated practice,” which depicts how a child, Amy, learns literacy through learning from visitors in her parents’ restaurant, as her parents are Chinese immigrants who knew no English upon coming to Canada.  Although she learned how to count, read, and her ABC’s, she experienced what the author called “literacy shock” in which the way that she learned was different from the way she will be formally taught in school.

            This article opened my eyes to something I couldn’t put into words or into comprehension.  The article expressed the handicaps that children from poor families with little education experience or just immigrants of people that didn’t speak the language of the country they are emerging into experience when they learn the language and attend school.  I know I never thought about the specifics of how people are taught language, I just took it matter of factly that people learned the same way I learned, but not al people are in the right situation to learn.  This was an eye opening reading which helped me understand the intricacies, better understand, on second thought, the intricacies that other people have in regards to learning language.  Although the literacy gap is created how can we address this to help all people that develop literacy shock?  We can’t rely on the parents because they aren’t adequate sources to go to because they don’t know the language and we can’t put more pressure on educators because they can’t possibly know all the languages and other differences in the student faces.  A possible solution could be literacy workshops, where people that speak common nonpopular language help teach the student to move towards reading and writing in a more formal manner.  By investing in the children hopefully it will pay off in the future and benefit the parents too as they learn from the child.