>--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "suzmccarth" <suzmccarth@...> wrote:
> Hi Steve,
>
> If I may speak as a teacher -
> I hate to do this but yes, define literacy.
>
> In various highly publicized international literacy studies
> Finland, Scotland and Japan have all done well - all different
> types of writing systems. The highest correlation is usually
> considered to be between "economic support of education
> infrastructure" and "level of literacy". You want to do a lot of
> research to make a statement about this one way or another.

A quick google search only shows results by either prose literacy or
document literacy and many international studies have too few
participant countries to be significant. However, Sweden, Canada
(BC), Australia and New Zealand have also done well.

Results of these studies look like this.

http://www.nifl.gov/nifl/facts/IALS.html

http://www.unicef.org/pon96/inlitera.htm

You want to have a low % at level 1 and a high % at level 3/4/5.

Here are some of the definitions of literacy used.

http://www11.hrsdc.gc.ca/en/cs/sp/hrsdc/arb/publications/research/199
8-001257/page05.shtml

http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/en/hip/lld/nls/Surveys/ialscrbk.shtml

http://www.nifl.gov/nifl/facts/IALS.html

You can probably see now why it is so hard to quote literacy stats.

Suzanne