[hzhou321]

To understand how pinyin helps Chinese become literate you have to start from a Chinese perspective. For an illiterate Chinese, he/she would be fluent in the spoken Chinese. So the barrier is the connection between written characters and pronunciations. Pinyin bridges that. With starter reading materials that are annotated with Pinyin, people can read (sound) the material and understand the material. So pinyin lets people read materials that even when it contains characters that they don't know. Pinyin lets people read, and by reading, people learn the written form and become literate.