| Summary: | Bibliography: p. [274]-285. === This dissertation uses ethnographic material to critique South African adult literacy policy. Recent policy documents, I show identify people who lack six years of formal schooling, and particularly people in this position who are also classified as blacks, women and people in rural areas, as being in a deficit position. Not only are they regarded as illiterate and therefore having a technical deficit, but policy documents also describe their "illiteracy" as a marker of their social deficit as marginalised people. Policy makers argue that the deficit attributed to adult literacy target populations can be effectively redressed through formal literacy interventions. I indicate that policy makers' arguments are based on interpretations of statistics .that fail to reflect the complex forms of literacy and the multiple social identities of people in the "target population" and also on a theoretical approach to literacy and which dichotomizes the cognitive, social, cultural and linguistic attributes of "oral/illiterate" people and those of "literate" people.
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