1. What is Literacy: A Model
Word knowledge, vocabulary knowledge, background knowledge, linguistic/textual knowledge, strategy use, inference-making abilities, motivation
Text structure, vocabulary, print style and font, discourse, genre, register
Text
Reader
Broader Context
Broader Context
comprehension
Context
Environment, purpose, discursive
practices, social relations, cultural norms
(e.g., schools, families peer
groups; academic content areas)

2. Cueing Systems of Reading and Writing
Graphophonic
sound/symbol correspondences and phonemic awareness
Syntactic
parts of speech and sentence structure
Semantic
word meanings
Pragmatic
contexts, purposes, history, sociocultural meanings and traditions
Visual
iconic images, pictures, charts, graphs
Discursive
ways of knowing, doing, reading, and writing

3. How Cueing Systems Work—Example
He stood perfectly still, alert to the sounds of the woods.
His attention focused on the sounds of his approaching prey.
As the delicate footsteps approached, saliva dripped from his sharp teeth.
Soon he was able to see the little girl and her red-hooded jacket.

4. Physiological structures, by contrast, operate more efficiently when they are well within the extreme limits set by external mass transport.
Animals, for example, do not metabolize to the point of collapse between meals, or between breaths. In ecological communities, behavioral mechanisms may mediate mass and energy flow; for example, in the division of nutrient flow among species-specific tropic niches.
Such behavioral mediation may cushion the physiochemical boundaries of community stability and thus appear to be conceptually independent of such boundaries.
However, behavior specialization simply allows more matter to be entrained in the cycles of the biological community, and thus allows the domain (in ecological hyperspace) occupied by living matter to fit more efficiently within whatever physicochemical limitations (for example, of temperature, isolation, or chemical potential) may bound a habitable hypervolume.
Blackburn, T. R. (1973). Information and the ecology of scholars, Science, CIXXXI, #4105,