Adults’ Eloquence Literacy as a Means of Adapting to Social Transformation: A Case Study on Adult Literacy in Xi’an, China

Over the past half-century, literacy research has predominantly framed literacy as the learning process of reading and writing. Based on this premise, international organizations have charted global literacy rates through reading and writing assessments, aiming to track the worldwide progress of literacy initiatives. While this method proves efficient, it focuses primarily on measurable skills, thereby sidelining the multidimensional nature of literacy as a social practice (Hamilton 2010). Furthermore, this approach tends to portray literacy as an endeavour with a definitive endpoint, being the achievement of certain literacy benchmarks. This perspective primarily revolves around literacy rates and their correlation with development indicators, presupposing that literacy activities predominantly occur within formal educational settings. This development lens overlooks the dynamic shifts of literacy as part of an ongoing process of social transformation (Castles 2001). Through the prism of social transformation, this chapter sees literacy not merely as achieving a specific milestone, but as a continuous journey intertwined with social, economic and cultural factors.