Text 1

Youth and Adult Literacy in Brazil:

learning from practice

The Concept of functional ILLITERACY

[…] A person is considered functionally literate....................he or she is capable..........using reading and writing skills..........meet the demands of his or her social context, using them to continue learning and developing over their lifetimes. With the expansion of the access to schooling beyond literacy, the focus was shifted to the quality of the educational process offered to all. The issue here is not simply whether people know how to read or write, but what they are capable of doing with those skills. This means that, besides the issue of illiteracy, a social problem that still persists in Brazil, there is also the issue of functional illiteracy; in other words, the inability to effectively use reading and writing skills in the various areas of social life after a certain number of years of schooling. According to census criteria, individuals with less than 4 years of schooling are considered functionally illiterate. […]

Source: https://unesdoc.unesco.org