Finally! Home in Trackton!

Awww! I have finally entered the holy land! LOL! Are you ready for this? Are you ready for my first blog? Here it goes... I truly found this particular article interesting. It caught my attention and made me think deeper about the co-existence of oral and literacy traditions. I came into this class with my own interpretations of literacy and well, they have changed ever since. I found the study conducted in Trackton to be helpful in distinguishing that oral and literacy events do not stand alone. The study concluded that, "In short, written information almost never stood alone in Trackton; it was reshaped and reworded into an oral mode." (451). Heath continues to describe that the residents of Trackton made oral and literacy events co-exist however I was shocked to read the following, "Yet their literacy habits do not fit those usually attributed to fully literate groups:" (451). Who are the fully literate groups and how do we determine this? I thought we already established that literate is a hard definition to fill? Although it goes further into describing that they are not fully literate because they do not read to their kids, do not encourage conversations based on books, or the mere fact that they do not write or read long passages of prose, I thought that the other everyday things (that Heath may not consider fully literate) constitutes them as literate, such as them reading the news and writing down addresses. These are things that literate people practice. Here I go again, into the deep deep pit of the definition literate! This is such a tough subject for me to define. Well, cheers to my first blog and I hope to leave this class in May with a firm belief of what is literacy! Or a small background on the subject!