Local literacies in a Cameroonian village

This paper explores the uses of literacy in a rural area in a developing country, and applies the ensuing insights to an examination of the provision of basic literacy teaching to adults in that context. Adopting the perspective of literacy as a social practice, I describe the literacy practices which I have found in my research so far among the Mofu-Gudur people of northern Cameroon, using the framework of vernacular literacy practices identified by Barton and Hamilton (1998). Following Rogers et al. (1999) and Street (2005), I demonstrate how the application of the social practice view of literacy together with adult learning theory reveals important issues to be addressed by the designers of adult literacy programmes