In these days, when more of us run than read, and when what we know exceeds what we understand, let me urge a return to the book. The book remains that small handy instrument that we call a key. We can all carry it and with it we can unlock most of the doors to the unimaginable beauties that lie somewhere beyond the TV set, to the east of the movies, and to the west of the moonshine that flows from too many media of communication. Best of all, the book is not a fleeting fancy. It is steady. It remains ready for reference, for reassurance, and paradoxically for the comfort of companionship as well as the luxury of solitude. I am for it.
—Walt Kelley1
Read: verb. To take in the sense of, as of language, by interpreting the characters with which it was expressed . . . To learn or be informed of by perusal . . .
Peruse: verb. To read carefully or critically . . .
Literate: adj. Instructed in letters; able to read and write . . . n. One who can read or write . . .2
These are suspiciously simple definitions. It is obvious that deciphering a child’s ABC book is a very different activity from reading at a high level, yet we call them both “reading.” It may be significant that another dictionary adds the description “archaic” to the word “peruse,” as if reading carefully and critically were such a rare activity that a word describing it is no longer necessary. The matter of reading is both complicated and critical to the future of the life of the mind, and we cannot understand libraries or human learning unless we place literacy in context and explore its meaning thoroughly.
In the common course of human development, a child will learn to speak and then learn to see more than random squiggles when presented with letters or characters. She will then learn that those letters or characters are capable of being linked in words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and, ultimately, complete texts. This process, which is usually accompanied by improvements and extensions in speech and vocabulary, can be described as “learning to decode.” It is the necessary precursor of understanding (though, of course, the dawning of understanding often accompanies rather than derives from the process of learning to decode). If you think of the process of learning a foreign language after childhood, you will see that, in learning, say, French or Spanish, you have a knowledge of most of the characters, and very little else. Even if the words assembled from those characters look vaguely familiar, you probably have little idea of how to pronounce them or what they really mean. Thus, the process of learning a foreign language is a process of proceeding from the basic characters through decoding to understanding, in the same way as acquiring the ability to read one’s native language. It is a long road from:
The cat sat on the mat.
to
Where the shadow is regarded as so intimately bound up with life of the man that its loss entails debility or death, it is natural to expect that its diminution should be regarded with solicitude and apprehension, as betokening a corresponding decrease in the vital energy of its owner.
This sentence from Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890) not only contains some words not commonly found in everyday speech, but also expresses a complex thought that requires analysis and understanding. Also, it is but one sentence in a mammoth twelve-volume exposition of a complicated and multidimensional subject. A person needs more than the ability to read in order to read that book with intellectual profit. She needs the basic decoding skill but, beyond that, the ability to interpret, think critically, understand, and learn.
According to David Wood, a shift in learning occurs typically between the ages of eleven and thirteen.3 At that time, it appears that students begin to learn more and absorb more from the written word than they do from speech and observation (this effect is true regardless of the level of reading ability). This observation reinforces the central importance of being able to perform sustained reading and use that activity to learn. It is interesting in this context to observe that the great majority of people learn more from and retain more of the knowledge contained in lectures if they take notes. In other words, it is important to be able to read even an abbreviated version of a spoken communication in order to reinforce that mouth-to-ear-to-brain experience by a supplementary eye-to-brain experience. In the same passage, Wood also emphasizes the importance of advanced reading to speech and the ability to achieve true literacy (his words apply to schoolchildren but surely have force for all of us of whatever age):
The child who is fortunate enough to achieve fluent levels of literacy has at her disposal a whole new range of words, linguistic structures, and skills in planning which [sic] enable her to create interesting, informative, dramatic, and coherent narratives . . . she has command over a range of literary devices and structures that can be exploited in speech to make what she says dramatic, flexible, variable, versatile, and, should she so wish, fast and efficient.
Literacy is not just a question of reading and writing—even at the highest level—but also an ability to express oneself fully. Some see the three abilities (reading, writing, and speech) as inextricably intertwined. I think that reading is the central portion of this complex in that one could live the life of the mind in isolation with printed texts—not the most highly recommended way of life, but certainly possible—whereas, it is safe to say, writing well is impossible for someone who cannot or does not read, and expression through speech may be vivid but will lack depth and substance unless it is accompanied by sustained reading. (Some might dispute these assertions with reference to preliterate and illiterate societies and the oral tradition. Though I can see the force of their argument, I would counter with these facts. What we know of, say, the Odyssey and Beowulf comes from the written record. For good or ill, we live in a time and society in which the oral tradition is not in any way central to the culture and life of most people, except in the bastardized and malign form of entertainment television.
As stated earlier and broadly speaking, human beings learn in three ways:
• They learn from experience.
• They learn from others (teachers, gurus, guides) who are more knowledgeable and learned than they in at least one area of human knowledge.
• They learn by interacting with the records of humankind found in books and other tangible and intangible documents created by other human beings.
The records of humankind (whether carved on stone, printed in a book, or contained in an e-book or other digital resource) consist of words, images, and symbols. To profit from those records, one needs to be skilled in understanding words and symbols and interpreting images. When skilled, we are able to interact with the minds of long-dead men and women and—adding a miracle to the miracle of the onward transmission of human knowledge—create new knowledge and record that knowledge for those yet unborn.
Reading, an activity that is routine to most of us, is in truth miraculous and should be cherished and encouraged. We speak of “learning” and “literacy” as if they were separate ideas, but they are inextricably linked. Literacy is more than a means to learning—although it is one of the most important means. In a real sense, literacy is learning and the sustained reading of complex texts as necessary to the developed mind as are air, water, and food to the healthy body. Reading at a level above the practical is a way of developing the mind, and the interpretation of texts is a rewarding intellectual activity in itself.
Despite many changes in the reading environment and all the discussions about various other “literacies,” it is evident that certain verities about reading are eternal even when the topic is twenty-first-century literacy:
Competent readers must also come to the reading act with an understanding of knowledge and knowing that fosters their engagement and heightens their abilities to think critically and analytically.
Moreover . . . such a critical eye and a facilitative epistemic orientation must be aided by the continued and lifelong pursuit of expertise in reading, by principled knowledge of the domains or topics encountered, and by perceptiveness and the ability to see relations within the flood of information that unrelentingly assaults us all.
Reading competence cannot be achieved within the first years of schooling; there is simply too much to be learned, to be honed, and to be experienced. Further, reading competence must be founded on a base of knowledge that permits the reader to navigate the hazards of irrelevant, inaccurate, and misleading content. And competent readers must be able to quickly and effectively grasp the similarities, contradictions, and conflicts within the ideas and voices that informational deluge contains.4
Modern neuroscience teaches us that various types of neuroplasticity mean that the old idea about brain structure—that it was relatively unchanging after childhood—is no longer accepted, that the brain undergoes physiological and functional organizational development, and that it can profit from learning at all ages. Neuroplasticity is the mechanism for development of the mind and for learning.5 In short, the habit of sustained reading of complex texts throughout a life can, using literacy as a tool, leads to understanding and wisdom—the ultimate goals of learning
There is a general idea that literacy rates have been climbing over the decades and centuries and that our society today is more literate than any of its predecessors. This fits with the “onward and upward” view of human history that, in essence, equates advances in technology with advances in culture and the health of society. Also, the presumption is that more than a century of mass education must have produced a literate society. A check in catalogues and indexes will reveal masses of titles over many decades on the question of literacy and society, all betraying an unease about where we are and where we are going. We can see a lack of satisfaction with the state of literacy and learning from the famously anxiety-producing Why Johnny can’t read,6 through Neil Postman’s book on “amusing ourselves to death,”7 to contemporary cris de coeur.8
Why is this so? The simple answer lies in what one means by “literacy.” If the word means “the ability to read at some level,” then we have mass literacy. If, however, to be literate means the ability to read and interpret complex texts (sustained reading) and the habit of doing so regularly, then the United States consists of two nations (not divided by class, race, or economics, in this case). The first nation contains the majority of people who can read enough to be able to function in society and in their work but seldom read other than for uninstructive recreation or out of necessity. The second nation contains a minority that reads to learn and elevate their consciousness.
The National Assessment of Adult Literacy defined four levels of literacy:
Below Basic: (no more than the most simple and concrete literacy skills)—14% of the US adult population
Basic: (can perform simple and everyday literacy activities)—29%
Intermediate: (can perform moderately challenging literacy activities)—44%
Proficient: (can perform complex and challenging literacy activities)—13%9
Alan Purves calls the proficient “scribes”—people who not only have the ability to code and decode text, but also have a rich basis of reference that enables them to understand and create complex texts.10 In his estimation, “the ratio of readers and non-readers is probably the lowest ever in American life since the time of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.” This last quotation demonstrates one of his points: in order to be truly literate, one needs not only to be able to read and understand the words in a text but to share in the scribal nexus of knowledge that enables the reader to realize the meaning behind the decoded words—in this case, knowing that the Colony existed in the seventeenth century and was made up of people fleeing religious discrimination, and that dissenters of that time were avid readers of the Bible and religious texts. Another analysis finds three groups: a well-informed “reading elite”; a large and growing group of people who can read but rely mostly on television and other media for information and entertainment; and an underclass of the illiterate and uninformed.11
Two big questions arise if we come to believe that we live in a society that is made up of two (or three) nations—the aliterate/illiterate and the truly literate. They are:
• Has anything changed?
• What are the consequences for society and for individuals?
It is tempting to see our present situation as simply a contemporary version of the societies of the past. There have always been elites and masses, the learned and the ignorant, the educated and the uneducated. The civilization of Ancient Greece, from which comes almost all that is good about modern civilization (democracy, the rule of law, education, philosophy, and on and on), was based on a small proportion of educated, prosperous people supported by a large number of uneducated slaves and serfs. More than a hundred years ago, Oscar Wilde wrote that twentieth-century technology would make possible a utopia—a re-creation of classical Greece with machines replacing helots and all citizens able to enjoy the fruits of the world and the pleasures of the intellect.12 Wilde got it right about the technology (just look at modern agriculture, which combines unparalleled productivity with a small number of human farmworkers), but was obviously wrong about society. At the end of the twentieth century, almost everybody in the developed world had unprecedented levels of material prosperity and freedom from drudgery, but can we really say that the general level of culture had increased? The forces that dominate society—cyberspace, infotainment. streaming media, television, mass marketing, advertising, Big Technology—seem to be more powerful than the drive to learn and live the life of the mind for the majority of people.
Are we worse off than we were fifty, one hundred, two hundred years ago? Are we better off? Perhaps neither is the case and only the details of society change. Optimists would point to the large number of books and magazines that are still published each year in print and online. Pessimists would invite you to look at the New York times list of best-sellers, dominated as it is by self-help manuals, shopping and romance novels, vilely partisan political books, ghostwritten biographies of television nonentities and sports people, rubbishy fantasy, and hyped-up drivel tied to movie deals. Optimists would point to “the promise of the all-digital future.” Pessimists would suggest you look at the mass of online content—online porn and violence, paranoid ravings, celebrity “journalism,” stultifying personal trivia, enormous accretions of transient and local information, and the odd golden nugget too often obscured by the mountain of dross. Optimists would point to the high percentage of people who can read and write. Pessimists would point to the relatively small percentage who do read and write at anything beyond a functional level. Such an argument is almost endless, as are the facts that can be adduced to support either side. What does not seem to be in dispute is that the understanding and power over one’s life that come from literacy and its exercise are of great benefit to the individual, both materially and psychically. Those who deal with the world by reading and writing in order to understand are better off in almost every way than those who do not.
This is a most important question for all of us because the health of society depends on there being a balance of interest between the elites and the mass of people. The former may well be the driving force in society, empowered by their knowledge to dictate—or, at least, heavily influence—the lives of others and the ways in which society is developing and changing. However, in the words of John Oxenham:
To those who hold democratic values, it is also important that the majorities of people should have an adequate understanding of what the minorities [the elites] are up to and be able to exercise some intelligent and informed control over them. Already it is arguable that even very literate citizens in relatively democratic polities find themselves unable to maintain a satisfactory grasp of the workings of their societies.13
Notice that the power elites overlap with the literate elites but are not identical. In other words, there are a number of truly literate citizens who have little control over the politics and economics of society. How do we ensure that everybody in a society has, at least, the chance of being as knowledgeable and informed as those in power? Literacy and the ability to deal with the torrents of information are, surely, essential prerequisites.
We have seen that literacy is not a simple question of being able to read or being unable to read. Literacy is best seen not as a state of being but as a process by which, once able to read, an individual becomes more and more literate throughout life; more and more able to interact with complex texts and, thereby, to acquire knowledge and understanding. It is a key element in the enterprise—learning—to which all libraries are dedicated. Instead of accepting the world as permanently divided between the illiterate, aliterate, and literate, we should see literacy as a useful tool with which to end that state of affairs. Viewed thus, literacy becomes an open-ended range of possibilities in which librarians, educators, and students work together to learn and become more learned using sustained reading of texts as a central part of the life of the mind. In this respect, the distinctions between kinds of librarian become unimportant—a children’s librarian or school librarian is as important to the early stages of literacy and learning as a public librarian or academic librarian is to the later stages. We are all involved in the same process: providing the materials, instruction, and assistance that enable individuals and societies to grow and to thrive intellectually. Incidentally, it is not a question that is of marginal importance to academic librarians. (I am not speaking here of the reading abilities or willingness to read of the average high school graduate—that is a separate matter of concern, though a manifestation of the direction society is taking.) Whether a librarian accepts the existence of two nations divided by literacy is not crucial to this discussion. The fact is that, whatever your view of the state of literacy today, literacy is important to individual well-being and societal achievement and a goal to be pursued by all libraries.
All librarians can and should be involved in promoting literacy to one extent or another. The most important thing that we can all do is to build and maintain collections of texts in all formats that are as rich and rewarding as possible, considering the mission of the library and the resources available. We should also encourage reading and the love of the self-improvement and pleasure that reading can bring. In all but the most specialized libraries, some (maybe a large proportion) of the library’s actual and potential users will not be interested in reading and will need encouragement to raise their levels of literacy. This means that it is no longer enough to build the collections and hope that they will come. Active steps to guide users to reading are called for, and the more methods (large and small) that the library employs the better. Simple things such as displays and new acquisitions lists sent to library users by e-mail, available on a web page, or communicated via social media can raise the consciousness of even the most educated users. Lectures, other public events, and publications can also be used to promote reading. Some kinds of libraries can create formal literacy programs using teachers, peer counselors, and advisers. Others may only be able to use more indirect means. Two things need to be emphasized, irrespective of the type of library. First, literacy programs, formal and informal, should not be limited to teaching the mechanics of literacy but should also aim at instilling the lifelong habit of reading. Second, all libraries are in the literacy game and should work together, formally and informally, to advance the cause, each in its own way.
I should begin this section by stating that I believe children are better off reading books and other texts than they are watching television, going online, or living any other kind of screen life. I also believe that librarians dealing with children can do no better thing than promoting reading and the love of reading. Children can benefit only from going online when they are firmly established as readers. School and public children’s librarians can have a formal involvement in reading and writing classes for children. They can also provide an environment that encourages reading outside the classroom (for schoolwork or pleasure). Displays, talks, storytimes, and contests are all tested and effective ways of bringing literacy to children. The attractiveness of the collection is central to the success of these libraries, because it is difficult to persuade a child to abandon all the many distractions of modern life in favor of old and superficially unattractive reading matter. The popular wisdom says that school and children’s libraries should have a major online component to enable children to be in touch with the “information age.” I believe this is a tragically mistaken policy that is likely to decrease literacy rather than advance it. There are those who would say “so what?” (see the end of this chapter), but they are people who do not value reading. Unless strictly controlled, the allure of the screen will distract young minds from the relatively difficult but rewarding task of reading texts and seduce them into online vacuity.
Public librarians can and do play a direct role in adult literacy programs by using their libraries as tutoring centers. There are specific reasons for designating libraries as teaching centers. Not only are librarians people who appreciate the enriching powers of reading and writing—possibly more than any other group—but also libraries are places that adult illiterates can enter with neither shame nor embarrassment. One writer believes that the central feature of successful adult literacy programs in public libraries is the “institutionalization” of those programs—their complete integration into the mission, goals, and programs of the library.14 An Australian writer states:
Public libraries, with their focus on intergenerational reading, their informal nature, their popularity across the age span and their prominent location within disadvantaged communities tick all the boxes for the development of adult literacy.15
The integration of adult literacy programs into the public library’s mission has, of course, great implications for the funding and planning of library operations and for the way in which the library presents itself to the community. In other words, the public library must not just become a convenient home for the adult literacy program but embrace that program as a natural part of what it does. The result is, of course, that a successful literacy program will ensure that the number of people who can take full advantage of the library’s programs and collections is increased. Beyond that, in raising the level of literacy in the community, the library is—and is seen as—a valuable community asset. Thus, an integrated adult literacy program is good policy on both idealistic and pragmatic grounds.
Academic librarians can encourage reading and writing through participation in Great Books and other, less formal programs. They can also participate in the regrettably large numbers of “remedial” classes found in all but the most elite, selective institutions. The sad fact is that many students who are accepted into higher education today are the product of a society and a school system that has de-emphasized basic skills, including the most basic skills of all: reading and writing. I am not making a political statement here and am a strong supporter of public education and increased funding for public education. However, I also believe that K–12 education would be transformed for the better if it were based on a syllabus that sought, from the earliest ages, to give intensive instruction in literacy and numeracy based on classroom teaching, supplemented by reading and writing assignments and experiences. The emphasis on technology over reading and creativity over basic writing skills, not to mention the proliferation of new and peripheral subjects, has produced a generation of nonreaders and poor writers. In many states, school libraries have deteriorated to the point of collapse. Is it any wonder that this witches’ brew has resulted in the need for remedial education in colleges aimed at bringing students up to competence levels at which they can deal with university-level courses? I have come to believe that the evolving structure of “library instruction” not only must accommodate basic online skills but also should be coordinated with remedial English classes to raise the levels of literacy among incoming students. This is a very different idea of the role of an academic librarian, and one on which many may frown, but altered circumstances call for new solutions and actions.
The United States incarcerates more of its people per capita than any other nation on earth. Regrettably, there is a huge and growing population in prison—a population that is disproportionately illiterate and semiliterate. This is not the only negative indicator about the incarcerated, but it is among the most telling. The scourge of illiteracy is the ultimate powerlessness of those deprived of liberty and is the antithesis of the freedom and power of the educated and literate elite. If rehabilitation is still an aim of imprisonment, literacy education is a key element. I admire many of my librarian colleagues, but, as a class, I admire prison librarians more than most. Prison librarians can act directly to attack illiteracy and to encourage those in prison not only to better themselves but also to find in reading the antidote to the despair of the lower depths of society. Prison librarians can use the range of methods to combat illiteracy, from the provision of reading matter to actual classes and tutoring in reading and writing. This again is another manifestation of the combination of idealism and pragmatism in the best of librarianship. Not only is it good to open mental doors for those with little help, it is also very practical—what are the chances of an illiterate former convict getting a job on release from prison?
Many special librarians have only the most general involvement with the question of literacy and have little chance to advance reading and writing specifically. However, as we have seen in the case of prison librarians, that is not always the case. For example, librarians in hospitals, particularly mental health facilities, can and do advance reading as a source of pleasure and diversion and, quite often, as an element in the healing and rehabilitation process.
In the twenty-first century, the question of reading and writing texts is still central to culture and communication. There are those who believe that technology will supply (and is already supplying) at least the possibility of alternatives to reading and writing texts that will enable people to become both educated and fulfilled in a postliterate society. Anyone attending meetings on university campuses will be familiar with chatter about “paradigm shifts” in learning and the importance of other “literacies”—“visual literacy,” “computer literacy,” and so on. Two European authors have discussed the “literacies” that “encompass different aspects of social, business and technological life in the 21st century, and challenges facing European education systems to adapt to these new forms of literacy” [my emphasis].16 All such talk is an attempt to deal with two facts:
• Most university students write at a level that is inferior to their counterparts of two or three decades ago and, by no coincidence at all, read less and read less well than those counterparts.
• We should face the fact that all educated people have to deal with texts, whether in the form of print on paper or on a screen and, if they cannot read books effectively, will be unable to read texts on screens.
These are stubborn and contradictory realities. There are only two real strategies: bringing students back to sustained reading (against the grain of their pre-university education) or evasion.
Examples of the latter abound and usually center on either the substitution of graphic or visual “information” for text or the birth of “new worlds” and “new ways of thinking” based on cyberspace or virtual reality or both.17 The prose that encases such proposals is so opaque as to be virtually unreadable. Of course, clear, concise, declarative language is hardly to be expected from authors who are attempting to express in written words an alternative to written words as a means of learning and growing. In a paper that advances, as far as I can tell, the idea that computers will make possible new visual means of storing and imparting knowledge that are superior to text, Pamela McCorduck writes:
[Text] . . . will be joined by other epistemologies or ways of knowing and high among them will be a return to visual knowledge. But, I suspect, for that way of knowing to be as effective as text, knowledge must be encoded in a way that will demand the same level of attentiveness that text now does.18
Well, quite. I read the paper with a suitable level of attentiveness and find no proposal that addresses the problem of encoding knowledge visually in a more intense way than we have for centuries of drawing, painting, photographing, filming, and creating online images. The primacy of text, which McCorduck believes to be coming to an end, is neither an accident nor the result of a slavish adherence to tradition. Attention has to be paid to text because of the depth and richness of its content. No amount of speculation about virtual reality can escape the reality (called, archly, “uppercase Reality” by McCorduck) that words can store and display depths of knowledge and nuance unmatchable by still or moving images or the fake experience of virtual reality. Insofar as we continue to learn from experience, virtual reality is a replacement for real life, not for texts.
The essential thing to remember about literacy is that it is, in Oxenham’s words, the “major enabling technology in the development of reason, logic, systematic thinking, and research.”19 Nothing based on sound, images, or symbols, or any permutation of them, can possibly provide a technology that is equal to the written word for those central purposes of the life of the mind. This is far from a purely philosophical statement. Modern education at all levels faces the problems of huge numbers of students, rising levels of aliteracy, and the cost of building new schools and campuses in the face of inadequate funding and deeply mistaken public policy. In Peter Deekle’s words:
College teaching increasingly uses electronic technology to bridge the growing gap between an aliterate population of undergraduates and an ever-expanding knowledge base.20
It is not surprising, therefore, that educationalists, politicians, and administrators at all levels embrace online learning (that is, library-less learning) and the “smart” classrooms as panaceas and de-emphasize the importance of reading and writing. Librarians should not be complicit in these intellectually lazy courses of action, but should work with their natural allies—teachers, faculty, and parents—to emphasize the importance of literacy and sustained reading to students.
The civilization that has lurched, with many ups and downs, from classical times to the present day is dependent on literacy and the spread of literacy into the less-privileged classes. It is possible that the spread of online access and the infotainment culture is a serious challenge to literacy and that only the privileged will be literate in the future (as was the case until the last hundred years or so). Libraries and librarians must do their best to ensure that we do not regress as far as literacy is concerned. We must do that by emphasizing that the sustained reading of texts is important to all of us—not least because our civilization may depend on it.
1. Kelley, Walt. Pogo files for Pogophiles. Richfield, Minnesota: Spring Hollow Books, 1992. page 217.
2. All definitions from Webster’s Third international dictionary.
3. Wood, David. How children think and learn, second edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. pages 210–211.
4. Alexander, Patricia A., et al. “Reading into the future: competence for the 21st century.” Educational psychologist, volume 47, issue 4 (2012) pages 259–280.
5. Pascual-Leone, Alvaro, et al. “The plastic human brain cortex.” Annual review of neuroscience, volume 28 (July 2005) pages 377–401.
6. Flesch, Rudolf. Why Johnny can’t read: and what you can do about it. New York: Harper, 1955.
7. Postman, Neil. Amusing ourselves to death. New York: Viking, 1985.
8. Cleckler, Bob C. Let’s end our literacy crisis: the desperately needed idea whose time has come. Utah: American Universities & Colleges Press, 2005.
9. National Center for Educational Statistics. National Assessment of Adult Literacy. http://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp (consulted August 28, 2014).
10. Purves, Alan C. The scribal society. New York: Longman, 1990.
11. Stedman, Lawrence, et al. “Literacy as a consumer activity.” In Literacy in the United States; edited by Carl F. Kaestle, et al. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. pages 150–151.
12. Wilde, Oscar. The soul of man under Socialism. 1891
13. Oxenham, John. Literacy: reading, writing, and social organization. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1980. pages 121–122.
14. Johnson, Debra Wilcox. “Libraries and literacy: a tradition greets a new century.” American libraries, volume 28 (May 1997) pages 49–51.
15. Thompson, Sally. “Public libraries: central to adult learning and literacy.” APLIS, volume 25, issue 4 (December 2012) pages 190–191.
16. Carneiro, Roberto and Gordon, Jean. “Warranting our future: literacy and literacies.” European journal of education, volume 48, issue 4 (December 2013) pages 476–497.
17. See, for example: Adolescents’ online literacies: connecting classrooms, digital media, and popular culture; edited by Donna E. Alvermann. New York: Peter Lang, 2010.
18. McCorduck, Pamela. “How we knew, how we know, how we will know.” In Literacy online: the promise (and peril) of reading and writing with computers; edited by Myron C. Tuman. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, pages 245–259.
19. Oxenham, “Literacy.” pages 131–132.
20. Deekle, Peter V. “Books, reading, and undergraduate education.” Library trends, volume 44, number 2 (Fall 1995) pages 264–269.