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Understanding Literacy: A Concept paper By Jude Fransman Introduction This paper aims to provide a summary of the major understandings of literacy, as they have evolved since the 1950s. In doing so, it seeks to unearth some of the implications that these different understandings have for monitoring literacy. Drawing largely from a background paper prepared for the GMR 2006 by Brian Street (2004) it charts four key components of literacy which define the evolution of the dominant (and largely Anglophone) discourse; literacy as a set of skills, literacy as applied and socially situated, literacy as a learning process, and literacy as text. Finally, a tentative framework which combines these dimensions as a heuristic device for understanding literacy is proposed. Since the mid-twentieth century considerable scholarly attention has been devoted to unpacking the meaning of literacy and the implications that this has for approaches to practice and policy. Different countries have entered the debates surrounding literacy in significantly different ways, according to their various epistemological traditions and their different political and socio-cultural experiences with literacy (see Box 1). Of course, external influences – from international organisations or dominant intellectual traditions – have partly shaped recent understandings of literacy (or at least those reflected by policy rhetoric) so that many contemporary understandings now echo the Anglophone tradition. The Francophone world is a case in point, with the recent adoption of the term littératie deriving directly from the OECD’s emphasis on information skills for the knowledge society. Box 1: Chinese and Francophone understandings of literacy Haar and Behr’s extensive bibliographies of literacy, writing, education and orality in Chinese culture reveal the ongoing importance of the oral tradition in China and pay special attention to the culture of manuscript production and the impact of printing and lib