Maternal schooling and health-related language and literacy skills in rural Mexico.

This article reports a study on the health-related language and literacy skills of mothers living in a rural Mexican town. Aiming to help fill the gap between research on maternal schooling and health and that on reading and literacy, the researchers apply a particular theory of literacy and schooling to understand the health-related language and literacy skills of mothers living in a rural Mexican town. Overall, the study showed that 1) there was wide variation in performance on all the skills measured; 2) there were significant correlations between oral language skills and reading skills; 3) scores on a decontextualized language task correlated with skills on the health-related listening, reading, and speaking tasks; 4) length of schooling was a significant predictor of the ability to provide decontextualized noun definitions, to understand spoken health messages, and to understand printed health messages, but at all levels of schooling there was wide variation in women's reading abilities; and 5) childhood schooling was not a significant predictor of women's health-interview speaking skills, although the control variable of adult socioeconomic status did not predict this ability. Research involving the relationship between decontextualized language and critical feminist consciousness is suggested.