Language for literacy and literacy for language

Abstract As the title of this chapter suggests, we argue here that achieving literacy for writing, reading, and digital communication is a two-way process of conveying and of gaining knowledge about language and about the world. Following a brief survey of writing systems from the papyrus scrolls of ancient Greece to digital screens, we underline the differences and interrelations between script-literacy (acquiring the alphabetic principle and basic reading and writing skills) on the one hand, and text-literacy (being able to produce and understand pieces of printed and digital discourse from personal notes via school materials and on to research reports) on the other. We then then consider characteristics of writing in academic settings, where expository-type prose is analyzed at the different but interrelated levels of genre appropriateness, global structure, syntactic packaging, and lexical selection. We show that these processes are affected by different rhetorical traditions, comparing the Anglo-American goal-oriented practices to the more philosophically oriented writing of continental and Latin-American usage. Attention then shifts to the interrelations between writing and reading as the two major facets of literacy, to psycholinguistic and pedagogical models proposed to explain these processes, and on to the composition and processing of digital texts. The concluding sections deal with the neurological underpinnings of text composing and reading, developmental trajectories in attaining text-literacy, and the shift in individuals from native to proficient use of language as functioning members of knowledge-based literate societies.