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Denise E. Murray
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3386-0421
Macquarie University, Australia
2
An Overview of Multilingual Learners’ Literacy Needs for the 21st Century
person who could write his or her own name as opposed to writing an “X” on a signature line for deeds
and legal documents (Lockridge, 1974). Obviously, notions of literacy in the 21st century have expanded
well beyond name writing, yet the most common and widely-used definition of literacy is still the ability
to read and write. Educators have also defined literacy on a sliding scale relative to the number of years
of schooling one has had, without consideration for the quality of the schooling, the knowledge and skills
of the individual learners, or even the number of uninterrupted years of schooling. For example, in the
United States, students in the fifth grade who are aged 9-10 are assumed to be literate by virtue of their
grade level. In order to explore the concept of literacy as it relates to the needs of multilingual second or
foreign language (SFL) learners from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, we must look beyond
common definitions and understandings to explore what being literate means in today’s world and how
societal changes have influenced our understanding of literacy. However, finding a consistent definition
of literacy that is appropriate for all contexts and learners is challenging.
There are a number of reasons why literacy is difficult to define. First, the concept of literacy can be
delineated in several different ways and on a variety of dimensions because different societal groups,
including educators, linguists, psychologists, and sociologists, have contributed to the knowledge base
from which common definitions of literacy have been derived. In a joint project on literacy, which was
conducted over two decades ago in Australia by the Department of Secondary Education (DSE) and
the Catholic Education Office of Victoria (CEOV), the difficulties associated with conceptualizing and
defining literacy were plainly delineated.
Definitions of literacy are notoriously difficult to compose. Literacy is a social construct, a complex
idea that means different things to different cultural groups at different times. Therefore, literacy is a
relative term and dynamic. While literacy is popularly understood to denote the ability to read and write
prose and other print texts, it is an integrated complex of language and thinking processes and skills,
incorporating a range of habits, attitudes, interests and knowledge, serving a range of purposes in dif-
ferent contexts. (DSE/CEOV, 1994, p.329).
As a social-cultural construct, literacy is influenced by the habits, attitudes, and knowledge of a
given cultural group. As such, it continues to evolve over time and in response to changes in society.
Globalization—the way in which people from different countries around the world interact, commu-
nicate, and integrate; demographic changes as a result of large-scale human migration; and advances
in digital technologies, affect how literacy is defined in terms of educational systems, labor markets,
and society in general. This observation is particularly poignant as it relates to considering events in
the latter part of the 20th century and the first two decades in the 21st century. As a result of societal
conflicts, human migration is at an all-time high, and this migration has created communities of people
worldwide who are culturally and linguistically diverse. For example, in BANA (Britain, Australasia,
and North America) countries (i.e., countries that accept large number of immigrants), there are now
sizable numbers of adult early emergent literacy learners who have educational needs that are quite dif-
ferent from the population of adult learners who are literate (Shapiro, Farrelly, & Curry, 2018). In other
words, some adults may have no literacy skills in their first language or even basic understandings of
literacy, such as the notion that symbols carry meaning or that the print environment is an important
mechanism for exchanging information in modern societies. Another result of large-scale migration is
the increasing number of English learners in K12 schools in BANA countries. In the United States, for
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