Literate Environment

A rich literate environment typically contains written materials (newspapers, books and posters), electronic and broadcast media (radios and TVs) and information and communications technology (fixed and mobile phones, computers and Internet access), which encourage literacy acquisition, a reading culture, improved literacy retention and access to information.

Literate environments can be found in both public and private spheres, including home, school, workplace, local community and the nation as a whole. Developing rich literate environments therefore includes language policies, book publishing, media, and access to information and reading materials.

Various recent pieces of research and studies acknowledge that a rich literate environment is essential for encouraging individuals to become literate and sustain and integrate their newly acquired skills in their everyday lives. The social and cultural environments in which people live and work can be characterized as being either more or less supportive of the acquisition and practice of literacy. In certain developing country contexts, the lack of written material in whatever form is a serious constraint on the practice of literacy.

Good examples of this are the Sudbury model of democratic education schools that assert there are many ways to study and learn. They argue that learning is a process you do, not a process that is done to you; that is true for everyone. It is basic. The experience of Sudbury model democratic schools shows that there are many ways to learn without the intervention of teaching, to say, without the intervention of a teacher being imperative. In the case of reading for instance, in the Sudbury model democratic schools some children learn from being read to, memorizing the stories and then ultimately reading them. Others learn from cereal boxes, others from games instructions, others from street signs. Some teach themselves letter sounds, others syllables, others whole words. Sudbury model democratic schools adduce that in their schools no one child has ever been forced, pushed, urged, cajoled, or bribed into learning how to read or write – no need to do that to the modern child, streetwise and nurtured on TV – and they have had no dyslexia. None of their graduates are real or functional illiterates, and no one who meets their older students could ever guess the age at which they first learned to read or write. In a similar form, students learn all the subjects, techniques and skills in these schools.