A recent, careful analysis of the most extensive, statistically accurate study of U.S. adult illiteracy ever commissioned by the U.S. government proves that U.S. adult functional illiteracy is much worse than previously believed. Adult illiterates must constantly endure serious physical, mental, emotional, medical, and financial problems that most of us would consider a crisis if they occurred to us. The good news is that there is a proven solution which has never been tried in English.
A recent, careful study of the most thorough and statistically accurate report on U.S. adult literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government (a free 200 page report available at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93275) proves that the extent and seriousness of English illiteracy is a much worse than previously believed. The good news is that the solution to English illiteracy is much easier than almost anyone would ever dare to dream.
Do We Really Have a Literacy Crisis?
As a result of being able to read, we are—to a large extent—separated from those who are very poor readers. As a result of the coping methods illiterates have developed, many of our associates may be illiterate without our knowledge. We therefore may find it hard to believe that we have a literacy crisis, but a recent study of the most thorough and statistically accurate study of U.S. adult illiteracy ever commissioned by the U.S. government conclusively proves we do have a crisis. This study was a five-year, $14 million study involving lengthy interviews of 26,049 U.S. adults statistically balanced for age, gender, ethnicity, and location (urban, suburban, and rural from twelve states across the U.S. and 1,100 inmates from 80 prisons) to represent the entire U.S. population. This report, titled Adult Literacy in America, divided the interviewees into five literacy groups according to their ability to respond properly to material they were given to read. The number of days worked per year and the amount they earned per hour was reported by literacy grouping.
Using data from the Adult Literacy in America report, Literacy Research Associates, Inc., a non-profit educational corporation, calculated the average yearly earnings by literacy group and compared with the threshold poverty level for an individual reported by the U.S. Census Bureau. The average annual earnings of U.S. adults in the two lowest literacy groups, comprising 48.7% of the interviewees were below the poverty threshold. This means that 48.7% of U.S. adults read and write so poorly that they cannot hold an above-poverty-level-wage job. This is another way of saying they are functionally illiterate. We do not see this level of poverty because most families have more than one employed adult and because most low-income families receive assistance from government agencies, family, friends, and charities. Literacy Research Associates also calculated the combined average yearly earnings of the two least literate groups and compared with the combined average yearly earnings of the three most literate groups. These data prove that 31.2% of U.S. adults who are functionally illiterate are in poverty and that they are more than twice as likely to be in poverty because of their illiteracy as for all other reasons combined. A total of .312 times 48.7 or 15.2% of all U.S. adults are in poverty, a figure in close agreement with poverty estimates from other sources.
Another reason we do not see this level of poverty is because the way that media presents information often hides the true dimensions of the problem. Most people have not read the above-mentioned report; their only knowledge of it comes from newspaper accounts of the study. The only known newspaper reports about the study, a New York Times article and a Washington Post article, appeared in some newspapers the day after the Adult Literacy in America report was released. Both of these articles badly obscured the true extent of the problem.
A 28 page follow-up report by the same agencies who conducted the 1993 study was issued in 2006 (available free at http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF). It used a smaller, 19,417 interviewee, database. There were no overall statistically significant differences in the annual earnings of the interviewees, by literacy level, between the 2006 and the 1993 reports. Although there are several ways of determining functional illiteracy, the employment of workers in for-profit businesses is undoubtedly the most accurate. Businesses will not keep someone on the payroll who reads so poorly that they cannot be a profitable employee.
Poverty, of course, is not the only problem that must be constantly endured by functional illiterates. Jonathan Kozol's 1985 book, Illiterate America, told of about 34 different types of serious physical, mental, emotional, medical, and financial problems that illiterates must constantly endure—problems that most of us would consider a crisis if we had to endure them.
The Simple, Logical Solution
An understanding of those problems was the main impetus behind several years of research performed by Literacy Research Associates, Inc. This research resulted in the modification and perfection of a proven solution to the problem of English illiteracy that has been recommended by dozens of educational and linguistic scholars for over 250 years. It is a solution that has been implemented by several nations smaller and larger than the U.S. and by both advanced and developing nations. Several distinguished scholars have thoroughly debunked all reasonable objections to this solution.
Most of us who can read, learned to read as children and have long since forgotten the difficulty we had in learning to read. Our eyes skip easily over a multitude of traps for beginning readers. Professor Julius Nyikos of Washington and Jefferson College made a study of six desk-sized dictionaries and found 1768 ways of spelling 40 phonemes in English. (A phoneme is the smallest sound in a language or dialect which is used to distinguish between syllables or words.) A computer was programmed with all of the rules of English spelling and was able to correctly spell only about half of a large list of common words. This is because every spelling rule has exceptions, and some of the exceptions have exceptions!
Our chaotic, illogical, and inconsistent spelling came about because in 1755 Dr. Samuel Johnson issued his well-received dictionary in which he, in effect, froze the spelling of words instead the spelling of the phonemes as linguistic logic demands. His dictionary froze the spelling, in most cases, as the word was spelled in the language of origin. There were eight different national language groups who had occupied the British isles by 1755, and we adopted words from each of them.
Since 1755, according to Henry Hitchings, in his book, The Secret Life of Words, we have adopted words—and usually their spelling—from 350 languages. Most English words, therefore, are not spelled with letters representing sounds but are represented by logograms like Chinese characters. Specific letters in a specific order represent the entire word in the same way that specific strokes in a specific arrangement represent Chinese characters. Although English spelling is less complicated than Chinese characters, it is more confusing. Specific strokes in a specific arrangement in Chinese always represent the same word or part of a word. In English a single phoneme can be spelled 60 or more ways and a single letter can represent as many as ten phonemes! As a result, every word in a person's reading vocabulary must be learned one-at-a-time by rote memory or by repeated use.
The "proven solution" mentioned above is due to the fact that Dr. Frank Laubach, founder of Laubach Literacy International, went around the world teaching illiterate adults to read in over 300 alphabetic languages. He found that in 90 percent of these languages he could teach them to read in from one to 20 days. In some of the simpler languages—as in one or more dialects of the Philippine language—he could teach adults to read in one hour! In 98 percent of the languages, he could teach them to read in less than three months. The grammar and syntax of English is neither the easiest nor the most difficult, but the spelling is by far the worst of any alphabetic language. The grammar and syntax of English is easier, for example, than several European languages, in every one of which students can learn to read fluently in less than three months. Most students require two years or more to learn to read English.
Dr. Laubach believes the U.S. wastes two-and-one-half years in teaching American schoolchildren to read. He states on page 48 of his book, Forty Years With the Silent Billion, "If we spelled English phonetically, American children could be taught to read in a week." Rudolph Flesch, in his book, Why Johnny Still Can't Read, states that Russian schoolchildren are taught to read 46 of the 130 national languages of Russia in first grade and that there is no reading instruction, as such, after first grade! Although learning to read English fluently in a week may be somewhat optimistic for some students, every student of normal intelligence can certainly be expected to learn to read fluently in less than three months—perhaps much less for some students.
Despite activity following the 1983 "A Nation At Risk" report about education, nothing done in the last eighty years has made a statistically significant improvement. All changes made to improve the teaching of reading to date really amount to merely tweaking the existing system to combat the symptoms of the problem rather than making changes to solve the problem. It is like taking aspirin to cure the symptoms of pneumonia instead of antibiotics to cure it. This is similar to, for example, acquiring new reading books to overcome the disadvantages of English spelling instead of solving the problem by making the spelling phonetic. Furthermore, whatever changes we make to the teaching method for present English reading material, the students will still have to contend with the chaotic, illogical, inconsistent spelling and will require well over a year to learn to read traditionally spelled English—one word at a time.
After Gary Sprunk, M.A. English Linguistics, read Let's End Our Literacy Crisis by Bob Cleckler, he formed NuEnglish, Inc. to promote the recommended spelling system. NuEnglish, Inc. is a non-profit educational corporation and a 509(a)(2) private charity. Cleckler is CEO of Literacy Research Assoc., Inc. His book describes NuEnglish, a simple, logical spelling system such as Dr. Frank Laubach recommended. It is quite obviously much easier to learn the spelling of the 38 phonemes used in NuEnglish and the way of blending them into words than to learn all 20,000 or more words in a person’s reading vocabulary. Some readers have a reading vocabulary of 70,000 or more words.
Gary Sprunk also added rules for NuEnglish spelling (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuEnglish) to improve consistency of the spelling and to enable programming of his Respeller program, which now has a database of over 498,000 English words. Respeller will convert up to about 25 pages of English material into NuEnglish spelling in only a couple of minutes. Respeller will flag any words not in the database. Users of Respeller can choose either the General American or the British dialects pronunciations. The Revised Version of Cleckler’s book, available from http://www.amazon.com/dp/1589824970,was published in May 2009 by American University & Colleges Press.
