The Key Role of Coding in Literacy Development
Coding skills have long been associated with workforce readiness and the digital fluency that students will need to thrive in the modern workplace. But the benefits of coding also extend to more fundamental challenges of literacy and language development.
In general, we associate coding with hi-tech contexts and users. And in more recent years, we have been hearing about how coding involves knowledge and skills that future generations will need in their jobs. The more we are integrating technology into our lives in general, the more the need for coding increases.
The learning and development of coding skills once took place primarily in computer or technology classes. But now, students from various learning contexts are learning these languages, as increasingly computers must be customized to complete very specific tasks, and these must be programmed intentionally. Indeed, computer coding is becoming as foundational to learning as math and language skills. Herzing University in an article titled "Why More Students Should Learn Computer Code" states:
"Rapid technological advancements the past two decades have forever changed the way the world communicates and conducts business. With the advent of mobile devices and adoption of cloud-computing systems, code-writing skills have become an increasingly important, but under-recognized, skill set for students and professionals across a variety of disciplines."
What Is Coding?
The word "coding" refers to the computer languages that we use to direct computers, interact with computers, and design and redesign computer use in various situations. So, the more we use computers, the more important coding is and will become.
There are various approaches that are referred to as coding but do not involve knowing the actual programming languages. In a 2018 article I wrote titled "Beyond Point and Click," I discuss how often "coding" refers to the front-end manipulation of screens, images, functions, and purposes, rather than the back-end languages that actually make these things happen.
As Sruthi Veeraraghavan explained in a 2022 article for Simplilearn:
"A programming language is a way for programmers (developers) to communicate with computers. Programming languages consist of a set of rules that allows string values to be converted into various ways of generating machine code, or, in the case of visual programming languages, graphical elements.
"Generally speaking, a program is a set of instructions written in a particular language (C, C++, Java, Python) to achieve a particular task."
The article provides a list of 14 coding languages and explains each one.
Connecting Coding to Literacy
Interestingly, professional skills are not the only benefits that are emerging from students learning to code. Coding is also having an impact on literacy — including both conventional and newer digital literacy skills.
The United States is facing a literacy crisis, with illiteracy (in terms of conventional literacy) increasing quite rapidly over recent years. The Resilient Educator provides the following as an overview of the current state of literacy in the U.S.:
- More than 30 million adults in the United States cannot read, write, or do basic math above a third-grade level. — ProLiteracy
- Children whose parents have low literacy levels have a 72% chance of being at the lowest reading levels themselves. These children are more likely to get poor grades, display behavioral problems, have high absentee rates, repeat school years, or drop out. — National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
- 75% of state prison inmates did not complete high school or can be classified as low literate. — Rand Report: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Correctional Education
- Low literacy is said to be connected to over $230 billion a year in healthcare costs because almost half of Americans cannot read well enough to comprehend health information, incurring higher costs. — American Journal of Public Health