Recently in Reflections on Literacy Category

Circulating in the Interwebs, is the 1895 Kansas 8th grade graduation exam... including:

Orthography (Time, one hour)
1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication?
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u'.
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e'. Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: Bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono,super.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: Card, ball, mercy, sir, odd,cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences, Cite, site, sight, fane,fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced andindicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

Read more....

An intelligent commentary by Ethan Zuckerman on a research presentation by Pippa Norris on cultural cosmopolitanism and exposure to globalizing media... would be nice to do this on a smaller scale and ask about values at the village level, comparing kids in villages with libraries to those without, controlling for the frequency of kungfu movie nights etc. in the village.

Professor Pippa Norris of Harvard’s Kennedy School, is focused on “Cosmoolitan Communications” for her forthcoming book, titled “Cultural Convergence”. Working with Ronald Inglehart of the World Values Survey, she’s studying the ways that communications impact the strength of national identity and the trust in outsiders. Her findings - which surprise some of her colleagues - suggest that increased cosmopolitan communications leads to more trust in others and reduced nationalism.

The context for her talk is accelerating connection through globalization, as tracked by surveys like the KOF Globalization index. As globalization increases, we see more opportunity for information to come across national borders. Some view this as a threat - thinkers like Herbert Schiller have suggested that the spread of corporate capitalism will lead towards the spread of American values at the expense of local norms. More recently, Benjamin Barber, in books like “Jihad versus McWorld”, suggests that American capitalism and culture are fundamentally intertwined. These theories have led UNESCO to worry that the availability of information from culturally exporting nations like the US could lead to a decrease in cultural diversity.

Read more...

Swedish mystery novelist Henning Mankell is a fierce African-oriented anti-illiteracy activist (AOAILLA), OMG just like me!

Let me now talk about illiteracy. It is a disgrace for the whole world that we in the year 2008 have yet to eradicate illiteracy on our planet. Still millions of children are forced to enter life without knowing how to read and write. The fact that we deny so many children these elementary tools means that we render them defenseless on so many issues related to AIDS. How can we expect a young person who lacks the ability to understand written information, who is unable to grasp the essence of vital knowledge, to protect her- or himself from becoming infected? Of course people talk, of course there is radio. There are also theatrical groups who travel the country to inform people. But the fact remains that we live in a world where the ability to read is necessary to acquire information.

Read more ...