When considering community literacy and the goal of achieving "community literacy," we need to take into consideration the variety of definitions that cover the term "literacy,"  Basically, UNESCO and our own U.S. Congress defines a literate person as someone who has acquired enough functional literacy skills to perform adequately within his/her community.  Functional literacy falls into three levels.
   
  One-quarter of the population of the United States functionally tests at the lowest level of functional literacy; they often report that they do not possess the skills to perform such literacy functions as the ability to fully read and comprehend a newspaper article, fill out a tax form, or read a medical questionairre.
   
  One-third of the population possesses the ability to perform the above functions and can compute simple mathematical questions: e.g., unit pricing, etc.
   
  The final small percent of out population has achieved higher-level functions, such as the ability to write text about text, to read literature, scientific text, etc. These people have achieved critical literacy.
   
  There is now a fourth kind of literacy, dynamic literacy, which assums the ability to incorporate text with other media -- computer usage, audio-visual information, etc. 
   
  We must determine at what level and which kind of literacy we are referring to when we speak of our "communities."  For example, in the community where I work, I see signs in the stores such as "cigarett saled."  
   
  Certainly, the high the functional level of literacy achieved, the better.  
   
  We must also be more precise when defining "100 percent literacy" as a goal.  Again, the community I work in will never achieve that; few communities will.  We are now a multi-cultural, even multi-lingual nation, dealing not only with African-American dialect, but with many peoples who not only come from logographic and syllabographgic writing systems, but who may be illiterate in their native languages and dialects.   
              


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