A Review about Functional Illiteracy: Definition, Cognitive, Linguistic, and Numerical Aspects

Abstract

Formally, availability of education for children has increased around the world over the last decades. However, despite having a successful formal education career, adults can become functional illiterates. Functional illiteracy means that a person cannot use reading, writing, and calculation skills for his/her own and the community’s development. Functional illiteracy has considerable negative effects not only on personal development, but also in economic and social terms. Although functional illiteracy has been highly publicized in mass media in the recent years, there is limited scientific knowledge about the people termed functional illiterates; definition, assessment, and differential diagnoses with respect to related numerical and linguistic impairments are rarely studied and controversial. The first goal of our review is to give a comprehensive overview of the research on functional illiteracy by describing gaps in knowledge within the field and to outline and address the basic questions concerning who can be considered as functional illiterates: (1) Do they possess basic skills? (2) In which abilities do they have the largest deficits? (3) Are numerical and linguistic deficits related? (4) What is the fundamental reason for their difficulties? (5) Are there main differences between functional illiterates, illiterates, and dyslexics? We will see that despite partial evidence, there is still much research needed to answer these questions. Secondly, we emphasize the timeliness for a new and more precise definition that results in uniform sampling, better diagnosis, conclusion, and intervention. We propose the following working definition as the result of the review: functional illiteracy is the incapability to understand complex texts despite adequate schooling, age, language skills, elementary reading skills, and IQ. These inabilities must also not be fully explained by sensory, domain-general cognitive, neurological or mental disorders. In sum, we suggest that functional illiteracy must be more thoroughly understood and assessed from a theoretical, empirical, and diagnostic perspective.

Proficiency level descriptors for low reading proficiency: An integrative process model

“…To follow up on this interdependence, it is worth investigating the extent to which cognitive and language-related deficits explain assignment to the low-literacy group, especially if the readers are non-native speakers, in order to validate that a person is assigned to the low-literacy group because of difficulties in reading only (e.g. Abadzi 2008;Vágvölgyi et al 2016).…”

“…Although research on reading comprehension of adolescents and adults with low literacy proficiency levels has been conducted for decades, there is still no precise, consistent and generally accepted definition of what constitutes low reading proficiency (for reviews, see Eme 2011;Vágvölgyi et al 2016). In public debate, the description of low reading proficiency is mainly derived from the description of the lowest proficiency level(s) in international comparative large-scale assessments such as the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), where low refers to "Level 1" and "below Level 1" (OECD 2013), 1 the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), where low refers to "Level 1" (OECD 2012), 2 or the German Level-One Survey (LEO), where low refers to "Alpha Level 3" (Grotlüschen and Riekmann 2012).…”

Comic’s Mathematics Learning (Cml): Pembelajaran Matematika Untuk Mengembangkan Kemampuan Literasi Matematis Siswa

“…Salah satu indikator peradaban suatu bangsa yakni literasi (Mulia, 2016;Levy, 2016). Rendahnya literasi mengakibatkan kemunduran dalam berpikir (Stine-morrow, Hussey, & Ng, 2015;Vágvölgyi, Coldea, Dresler, & Schrader, 2016). Untuk meningkatkan kemampuan berfikir perlu adanya literasi matematis (Afifah, Khoiri, & Qomaria, 2018;Firdaus, Wahyudin, & Herman, 2017;Julie, Sanjaya, Anggoro, & Rudhito, 2018;Julie, Sanjaya, & Anggoro, 2017…”

Writing, Graphic Codes, and Asynchronous Communication

“…None of this changes the fact that these writing systems encode linguistic categories (morphemes, syllables, or phonemes). One can profit from the information that writing encodes without mastering this code: Functionally illiterate people can decode words by associating their shape with the context of their occurrence; but this strategy only goes so far (Overmann, ; Vágvölgyi, Coldea, Dresler, Schrader, & Nuerk, ).…”