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National Literacy Trust finds that only 35% of eight to 18-year-olds read in their spare time, a sharp drop to the lowest figure on record; Only 28.2% of boys read, while 40.5% of girls did : books
Main Post: National Literacy Trust finds that only 35% of eight to 18-year-olds read in their spare time, a sharp drop to the lowest figure on record; Only 28.2% of boys read, while 40.5% of girls did : books
We need more financial literacy : FunnyandSad
Main Post: We need more financial literacy : FunnyandSad
Why are people talking about kids not being able to read anymore?
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https://youtu.be/-_n4CRyWhzM?si=-yvtNq2Rr9UrrpGL
Teachers, do you have any experience with declining literacy rates in children? How much of a problem has it really been? Are these stories just anecdotal or is there real data to support it?
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Literacy rates in the US are fucked. Keeping your kids off Tik Tok and away from iPads won't solve the issue
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Saw a post on here last week from a teen with a younger sibling. "He can't even read. His attention span has been fried and his vocabulary reduced to gen alpha slang."
That's pretty wild -- a presumably grade-school sibling that's illiterate. Except he doesn't seem to be alone:
["My oldest (5th grade) [...] said he’s one of only a few people who can read in the class." - from Blind] (https://www.teamblind.com/post/An-alarming-number-of-kids-are-illiterate-botLaCzg)
Before I go further, illiteracy is a complex issue that's literally as old as mankind (brains aren't wired for reading, more on that in the podcast I mention later). Confounding variables and obstacles like geography, social / wealth class, parental involvement, biology, training make illiteracy an educational Sisyphus stone. I don't have any sweeping solutions. I'm not an expert, in fact what I'm about to tell you I literally learned last month. But the podcast Sold a Story does have experts. It's got studies, it's got anecdotes, it's several hours long, but if you have kids in school districts with Balanced Literature, Cued Language, or Whole Word approaches to reading education, you should probably give it a listen. It was on Apple's 2023 popular podcasts list, won a Scripps Howard award, and has influenced widespread curriculum change since it's release in 2022. If you're an involved parent or avid podcast listener, there's a good chance you've already heard it. But if you're like me, this might be new and shocking information to you, so here's the short of it:
- Some teachers have shifted from a phonics based approach to teaching reading to a whole words approach of reading education.
Phonics is what you and I grew up on. You don't know a word? Sound it out, letter by letter. Work your way through it, reference your knowledge of letter groupings and letter sounds to select the right sound from the 44 different sounds in the American-English lexicon. That's the science backed way to learn reading: decoding words into their component phonetics and then mapping it against your knowledge-base of words.
The whole words approach is totally different. You don't sound anything out. You look at the first letter and then use context clues to think about what that word could be. Students are literally encouraged to block out a word and guess what might come next based on what the sentence has said so far. They might use the first letter to run through their rolodex of potential word matches, they might use the provided picture to help guess. So how do kids learn words this way? They memorize them. Imagine having to memorize every single word you know; you can't use the component parts to sound it out. You have to know exactly how to spell everything without phonetic aids, you have to memorize every word from the simplest "cat" to the most complex "catastrophe". And this "learning" process is lubricated by pictures. What happens when the pictures disappear? The kids are fucked. What's more, if the kids guess a word with similar meaning, that's considered correct. (i.e. little Timmy reads "Tim discovered the horse" as "Tim found the pony" because he looked at the picture for help, he would be marked at appropriate reading level)
At this point, if you're thinking this method sounds really bad, that's because it is. The whole language approach has been debunked multiple times. It's been functionally repealed in both Australia and New Zealand (origin of whole language as a special needs curriculum.)
Decoding/phonics has been well documented to be the most efficient way to teach english reading. It's not taught to English as a Second Language learners, I have no idea why it's taught to our kids
2. The good news is, none of this is breaking news. There's already significant pushback on this whole language family of curriculum within grade schools nationwide. Many districts are shifting away from it. But if yours isn't, and your kid cannot read, you may want to rule this out as a core issue. Whole language doesn't tend to affect affluent kids as much because they can afford tutors to teach them decoding (the proper way to learn reading). It may work for a very slim minority of children, but by and far, it's not a remotely good method of learning to read. The problems compound if your child has a learning disability like dyslexia since they may be specially "treated" with reading recovery / whole language.
I don't really have a solution, this is more of an FYI for the lucky 10k people learning about this today. If your child cannot read, and they've "learned" to read via whole language, you may have to start from scratch and teach them phonics ASAP. And nothing wrong from limiting your kids exposure to social media or electronics at younger ages IMO, the only point I'm making is that won't solve the literacy issue alone.
Edit: Some of y'all are missing the point. Yes, as a parent, you should make an effort to read to your kids. Yes, there are things parents can be doing to shore their kid up for success. At the same time, if you've got and are spending all this time helping your kid and they're being taught Balanced Lit or some variation of it in school, it's going to impede your efforts at home. Your specific kid may do fine with your tutelage and that's great, but the bottom line is: Balanced Lit, Cued Reading are habits and heuristics of bad readers. Good reader decode, map against their phonetic knowledge-base, and have a wide range of vocabulary.
Others don't seem to be concerned with the illiteracy data, saying the literacy rates are A) not alarming and B) a result of the pandemic.
A. Averages are down, percentiles are worse. As I stated above, affluent have been shielded from the worst of this. Children with involved parents likely have been too. Top percentile reading scores did not move significantly, bottom percentile did. Drops of 5 - 10 points for students already way below NAEP Proficient. If you don't think that's that bad then carry on, I guess we have different thresholds for what counts as alarming. There's also been an shrinking of % of students in NAEP Basic and Proficient. ~3% or so and they've moved over to NAEP Below Basic. Remember, this is representative of the nation, so a 1% drop is like 40,000 students.
B. Here's the 2019 assessment. The trend was exasperated by the pandemic, not started by it: "Reading scores lower for White and Black students at grade 4 and for all racial/ethnic groups except Asian/Pacific Islanders at grade 8 compared to 2017"
And the drops can be traced by to highs in 2013 / 2017 for NAEP Basic & Proficient. To be clear, NAEP basic isn't even very good reading level, that's pretty bare bones baseline. Both these pools are shrinking because NAEP BELOW Basic is growing. (https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/achievement/?grade=8)
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I don't really have a solution
The solution is kinda simple, but hard to implement. Parents need to be really really really engaged with their children's education. That means reading to them from the cradle to well past when they should be able to read. It means figuring out where their kids should be and getting them the help they need if they arnt there. It means modeling good behavior, aka reading for fun too.
I dont blame parents. Some are working 70 hour days to just to make ends meet. But even so, an effort needs to be made.
We blame teachers for a lot of outcomes that are actually societal failures. To be sure, whole reading IS a problem, and we need to switch back to phonics ASAP, but its not just curriculum. Teachers get their students reading like 4 hours a week if lucky in elementary school. Its up to the rest of us to get our kids reading at night, on the weekends, and very importantly over the summer.
How does one increase literacy?
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How does one increase literacy? Starting with the self. How could one increase their own literacy?
Is it by reading novels? Well what if novel’s are too hard? Or too long? One may just not have the time for it. Is it by reading novellas? Or is it by reading credible articles? Or is it by reading any article? Or is it by reading a blog post? Or is it by reading a reddit post? Or is it by reading a comment? Or is ir even by reading anything at all? How does one increase literacy? Noam Chomsky had mentioned that this would need to be combatted in the digital age. How would one go about doing this?
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What do you mean by literacy? Being able to read and write or something else?
Literacy Program
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I am applying for an occasional position and was told i may be asked about how I would develop a literacy program. I often feel confused by that question. Can anyone provide clarity/give an example of what a literacy program would look like? Are they referring to a unit? Just a bit confused.
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If you are in Ontario they will want to know how familiar you are with the science of reading. Also they will be looking for how you will divide up your literacy block so that your students can benefit from small group instruction.
TIL 130 million American adults have low literacy skills with 54% of people 16-74 below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level
Main Post: TIL 130 million American adults have low literacy skills with 54% of people 16-74 below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level
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Sometimes this amazes me, and then I’ll read an email from someone at work who I talk to in the kitchen but don’t interact with professionally and I’m like holy shit.
US literacy rate
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I was staggered when I found out today about the literacy rates in the US:
Approximately 32 million adults in the United States can’t read, according to the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that 50 percent of U.S. adults can’t read a book written at an eighth-grade level.
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/11/01/hiding-in-plain-sight-the-adult-literacy-crisis/
How can this happen and how the hell people are passing their grades without ability to read ?
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Friend of mine is a high school teacher in CA. His sole job is to get kids who can't read in high school to read at a 6th grade level by the time they leave. He says at a 6th grade level at least they have a chance. He is only about 50% successful.
How literate was Roman society?
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I know that during the Middle Ages, literacy was horrendously low. Would Rome, being a much more sophisticated society compared to medieval kingdoms, have a higher literacy rate amongst it’s people? Would the poorer peoples of Rome be comparable to medieval peasants in literacy?
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All I know is that the graffiti in Pompeii indicates many people could read.
http://www.pompeiana.org/Resources/Ancient/Graffiti%20from%20Pompeii.htm