Some of us may be unfamiliar with the language of “oral preference learners” in the context of global missions. This phrase captures an essential concept that describes most, if not all, of Upstream’s end users.

Literacy and Oral Communicators: Not So Black and White

Global literacy rates are reported to be at around 86%. Based on this, one would think that most people can read. However, there is much gray area when it comes to defining what it means to be “literate”. For example, some countries check the literacy box if people can read at first or second grade levels.

I was in a room with 12 young believers from an ethnic group with very few Christians. I had been tasked with teaching them the Scriptures each afternoon for a week. I had Bibles in a trade language and their mother tongue, but when I passed them out only two people took a Bible. I thought they might have misunderstood my instructions, so I tried to pass them out again. Most of them had at least a high school education; surely they could read! Then a leader stood up and said, “We can read the words on the page, but we can’t understand it. It just doesn’t make sense.”

The people in the story above are known as oral preference learners. Even though they are “literate”, they understand and internalize truth through oral means. They prefer to interact with God’s Word in an oral way. They are already receiving truth from their families and communities in oral ways; this is how their cultures operate.

Here is a definition of oral peoples from the International Orality Network:

“An Oral Communicator is a person who learns or processes information by spoken rather than literate means. Some oral communicators are this way out of necessity because they cannot read or read with understanding. Other oral communicators can read with understanding and write, but they prefer non-print forms of communication. ​An oral learner is a person whose mental framework is primarily influenced by spoken rather than literate forms of communication ​and who therefore learns primarily or exclusively by speech, song, etc.”[^1]

Oral Preference Learner Illustration

God has graciously given us his written Word. Ideally, people would have direct access to Scripture in their language, but that is not the reality of many unreached language groups. Some people simply can’t make sense of written things other than directions, menus, and prices. For others, the written language is vastly different from the spoken language and the latter is not written down. The classical written text is seen as the gold standard, but it reflects the way people talked hundreds of years ago. The common person has difficulty making much sense of it.

Although literate and non-literate can be helpful categories, this black and white dichotomy fails to correctly locate the majority of the world’s population. Oral preference learners fall into a gray space where some level of reading may take place, but receiving truth typically doesn’t happen in a person’s heart language through written means.

Why This Matters for Upstream Contributors

If our end users are oral preference learners, then this reality helps us understand a common feature across each of Upstream’s projects. Even if languages or countries are different per app, we must design and develop while envisaging such an end user sitting across the table from us.

I often find that designers and developers, of no fault of their own, create with an English speaking, literate end user in mind. This subterranean assumption spills out into app design and functionality. We would do well to probe our assumptions as we create together. For example, how might oral preference learning affect:

  • App Navigation: Where do we have unnecessary text? Is there any way that clear navigation can be accomplished without text?
  • Modal Window or Text Prompts: Are they necessary? If so, can the user have an icon-driven experience?
  • Icon Selection: Oral learners see houses, balls, and boxes where highly literate people see triangles, circles, and squares. What does user testing reveal about the shapes and icons that we select?
  • Visual Hierarchy Between Audio and Text: Are we defaulting towards building mini audio players with a small play button at the bottom of the screen? Why should text receive more screen space?

The list goes on and on. The point is that over time we can grow to embed the world of oral communicators into our DNA, such that our intuition becomes trained to design and develop with these end users in mind.

Perhaps IKEA gets it right, after all. Apart from maddening frustration with their miniature allen wrenches, one has to admit that their instruction manuals are pretty rad. Everything is communicated through pictures, diagrams, and icons. IKEA isn’t thinking about oral preference learners, of course, but they’re able to get users from A to B without text. I think that we can learn a thing or two in this regard.


1 https://orality.net/about/who-are-oral-communicators/ (emphasis mine)