>Limited literacy needs to be separated from both illiteracy and from
>lack pf "time, energy, & willingness." In a communist group Jan & I
>formed in Bloomington-Normal back in the early '70s the presence of
>several members with little or no academic training and poor reading
>skills created a serious problem for internal study. We struggled with
>this in various ways, some successful, some not.
>
>One technique that worked very well but required more time and energy
>than the three "highly literate" members could give was making tape
>recordings of the study texts. I recorded the whole of _Wages, Price and
>Profit_. I got the idea for this from quite a miscellany of sources:
>from Sweet's program for teaching Latin at Michigan, from my personal
>experience with reading Pound and Yeats, from the practice of the
>teacher I had in the 3rd & 5th grades, from the sort of reading I & my
>first wife did for our daughters, from my earliest glimpse of the
>coherence of the _Wasteland_, and from my experience in teaching novels
>in an introduction to prose fiction class for non-majors. Core ideas
>extracted from these sources: (1) If one goes through a text, even a
>quite complicated one, fast enough, it tends to teach itself; (2) One
>can sometimes grasp patterns and contents which are far beyond one's
>reading skill if one hears the book read; (3) Listening to a taped text
>_while_ reading it (e.g., the Latin text of the Aeneid after studying
>Latin for only 4 months), by forcing the pace, allows one or forces one
>to be content with what one can get on the fly -- which is often more
>than one would guess in advance of trying.
>
>In any case it worked with the one text by Marx. A reader (or
>non-reader) who had been quite defeated in her initial attempts was able
>to participate fully in group discussions of it.
When it comes to the problem of limited literacy, much maligned "jargons" (= technical terms) are actually helpful & in fact a cause of (1): "If one goes through a text, even a quite complicated one, fast enough, it tends to teach itself." Writers use "jargons" (= technical terms) to define meanings of indispensable concepts precisely & fix them within the terms of a given genre of discourse. Seeing the same words used again & again & again with the same meanings helps the reader gain understanding. In other words, "jargons" have a limiting function with regard to semantics. Translating poems from one language to another is difficult because poems try to eschew "jargons"; whereas translating technical documents is the easiest once you get the hang of it.
Yoshie