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Learning The Code And The World Today Without Literacy Skills Essay

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It is hard to imagine our world today without literacy skills. The absence of literacy will rob us of many things that we now deem as important. We will not be able to enjoy great masterpiece by legendary authors like William Shakespeare and know important scientific findings such as the discovery of gravity. In hindsight, literacy skills are essential in order to preserve and pass on knowledge from a generation to another. Because of this, it is not a surprise that literacy is a very popular topic of discussion in the field of education. Although majority of the world population nowadays are literate, the process of becoming literate actually is a complex process. New Zealand’s Ministry of Education (2003) comes out with a framework for literacy acquisition which includes three different aspects that are needed in order to be literate; learning the code, making meaning and thinking critically.
Learning the code refers to the knowing how to encode and decode written form of languages. Making meaning, on the other hand, involves acquiring the skills to understand and convey messages in written form. The process of thinking critically brings this onto a higher level where readers will read a text beyond the literal level and respond to it in a more personal way. These three aspects are crucial for literacy acquisition because without them, one cannot fulfil the definition of being literate which is to “understand, respond to and use those forms of written language that are

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