Textual Literacy

Textual literacy is not about learning to read a book - though it is certainly an important part. But if you've made it this far you can obviously read.

Textual literacy is looking at any sort of resource, be it a book, an internet page, or even a picture and being able to understand it, put it in context and how what you see or read relates to what you are trying to study, accomplish etc. I'll give you a quote to keep in mind that might help when remembering about textual literacy -

"Repeating what someone has written or said requires education. Challenging it requires brains."

That is the aim of textual literacy. Challenging information, synthesising it, adding to it, going beyond the boundaries set by the text you are looking at. Don't just look at a painting- study it. Is it oil or pastels? Look at the brushstrokes? Landscape or still-life? All of these are questions that are a part of textual literacy.

If you are looking at an atlas for a geography do you know when it was published? This is important because country boundaries and names can change. Does the atlas have USSR in large print over Russia? This means that the map is out of date.

If you want to find weather patterns for the last year, the weather service is a great resource because they have archives on this information - however, finding information on the weather in Japan? Try the internet or the international new on the SBS channel.

These are just some of the examples of how textual literacy plays an important part in your studies. It requires you to push beyond the boundaries of what you can see, into what you can know.