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"Literacy" Defined

Sudol and Horning preface James Paul Gee's definition of literacy by saying:

James Paul Gee, a sociolinguist, and hence, a scholar with an awareness of the political as well as linguistic aspects of literacy, defines literacy through his concept of discourse (Gee, 1991). Gee makes a distinction between primary and secondary discourse, identifying primary discourse as oral discourse in a person's native language, developed through internally driven processes of acquisition; that is, primary discourse is not formally taught. By contrast, secondary discourse is that used for dealing with schools, government, the workplace and so forth. Literacy, then, is "control of secondary uses of language (i.e., uses of language in secondary discourse)" (p. 8). Notice that, by Gee's definition, critical literacy develops through both acquisition and learning processes found conventionally in schools. (viii)