Definition of Literacy

If you had asked me before I took TE 301 this past summer (which, I would never recommend anybody doing over the summer term, but I digress...) I would imagine that my definition of literacy would have been invariably different than the one I have now. While I would still say that I think literacy is the ability to perform the acts of reading and writing I would also now expand my definition to include the substructures of each of these categories that I learned about in that previous class. I would say that under each of these headings I would include the sub topics of genre, concepts of print, phonological awareness, morphology, motivation and vocabulary. Under reading specifically I would include comprehension and fluency. If I had to make a definitive one-sentence definition of the term literacy, however, I would probably say that literacy is the ability to read and write which comes with very specific substructural components assigned in regards to be reading and writing respectively.