Summary: A recent, careful study of the most thorough and statistically accurate report on U.S. adult literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government and a careful analysis of the effects of illiteracy proves that the extent and seriousness of English illiteracy is much worse than previously believed. The good news is that the proven solution to English illiteracy is much easier than almost anyone would ever dare to dream.
An Absolutely Essential Introduction
There are two basic ways that something can be read. It can be quickly scanned, reading portions here and there that catch the readers attention, in an attempt to determine if the reader really wants to spend the time required to understand it. After such scanning, the readers often assume, incorrectly, that they know what is proposed and—without knowing the details—know it will not be successful. The other way of reading is to start at the beginning of the book or article and carefully, honestly read all of it sequentially, trying to understand the material that is presented. There are many people who will tell you that they are compassionate toward illiterates and persons in poverty. But if they say, “I’m concerned, but I am busy with other things that I am concerned about and can’t spend any time on the problem of illiteracy,” they are not concerned enough to be of any value to hundreds of millions of functionally illiterate English-speaking people around the world, many of whom are in poverty because of their illiteracy. It is a matter of prioritization. Understanding the facts presented in this website will—if you pay attention—undoubtedly increase your compassion for those struggling with their illiteracy. If everyone could give up just one 30 minute TV program each week and forward information about literacy to family and friends, the combined effort could very well begin the “grass roots” type of action that could definitely and permanently solve a very serious problem.
Although most of the more than 1.3 billion English-speaking people around the world are functionally literate in a language other than English, hundreds of millions of them are functionally illiterate in English. For the sake of an estimated 600 million English-speaking people who are functionally illiterate in English around the world, including more than 93 million in the U.S. alone, you are challenged to carefully, honestly examine this website.
What Is Functional Illiteracy?
Although millions of people know a thousand or so simple English words they learned in the first four grades in school, they cannot read well enough to succeed in life as they should. Perhaps the best definition of functional illiteracy is: the inability to read and write well enough to hold an above-poverty-level-wage job. There are other definitions, of course, but the incentive to be very accurate in assessing illiteracy is probably strongest when a company’s financial future depends upon hiring employees who can read and write well enough to be worth more to the company’s profitability than the salary they are paid.
Why is Functional Illiteracy in the U.S. So Badly Underestimated?
Functional Illiteracy is almost certain to be far worse than you realize because (1) functional illiterates have developed numerous coping methods to get by in life and as a result are very good at hiding their illiteracy, (2) as a result of lower wages for functional illiterates, zoning laws for housing, and the natural separation that occurs in a workplace according to job functions, there is a large amount of separation of people according to their reading ability, and (3) although functionally illiterate workers usually make poverty-level wages, we do not see a corresponding amount of poverty because most families have more than one employed adult and most low-income families receive assistance from government agencies, family, friends, and charities.
What is the True Extent of Functional Illiteracy in the U.S.?
There have been several reports of the shocking amount of functional illiteracy in the U.S. in the last twenty-five years, but the most thorough and statistically accurate study of U.S. adult literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government was a five-year, $14 million study involving lengthy interviews of 26,049 adult reported in 1993 (see http://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93275.pdf) and confirmed by the same researchers in a slightly smaller database (19,714 interviewees) in a report released in 2006 (see http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF.) The interviewees in these studies were statistically balanced for age, gender, ethnicity, and location — urban, suburban, and rural in a dozen states across the U.S. (and in the 1993 report: 1100 prisoners from 80 prisons)—to represent the entire U.S. population. These reports prove (1) that 48.7% of U.S. adults are functionally illiterate, (2) that 31.2% of functional illiterates are in poverty (31.2% of 48.7% is 15.2%, the percentage of all adults in poverty, which is in close agreement with other estimates of poverty), and (3) that functional illiterates who are in poverty are more than twice as likely to be in poverty as a result of their functional illiteracy as for all other causes combined.
What are the Effects of Functional Illiteracy?
Most Functional Illiterates must constantly endure serious physical, mental, emotional, medical, and financial problems that we would consider a crisis if they happened to us. They must deal with at least 34 different kinds of problems. Many simple tasks we perform every day to survive in our present culture are beyond the abilities of most functional illiterates. Their illiteracy, however, also has effects upon those of us who are fluent readers. Many of us must endure the emotional distress of concern for persons we know who are in poverty, even if we do not know whether or not functional illiteracy is the cause of their poverty. Furthermore, illiteracy costs every U.S. adult—reader and non-reader alike—at least $5186 each year for (1) government programs that help illiterates, (2) the cost of truancy, juvenile delinquency, and crime directly related to illiteracy, and (3) the higher cost of consumer goods as a result of functional illiterates in the workplace. Employers have higher costs for recruiting and training employees and for preventing and correcting errors made by functionally illiterate workers. Most of these higher costs are not only passed on to the consumers, but the higher costs make competition more difficult with overseas companies whose workers do not speak English but have a higher literacy rate than companies with English-speaking workers.
What Is the Primary Cause of Functional Illiteracy?
There are many reasons why any one student may drop out of school or graduate without learning to read well. In addition to the possibility of poor reading books, poor teaching methods, eye problems, dislike of the teacher, and numerous other problems, there are numerous pleasurable activities taking a student’s time that did not exist before the 1920s, such as music on radio, iPods, and “rock concerts,” video games and movies on TV and computers, and many new athletic and school activities. There is also an increased amount of negative influences, such as new drugs, gang activities, and broken homes as a result of loosened divorce laws in the twentieth century. But there is only one problem that affects every student: the inconsistent, illogical, and chaotic spelling of English words. Most of us who are fluent readers learned to read as children and have long since forgotten (or pridefully ignore) the difficulty we had in learning to read. Our eyes glide easily over a multitude of traps for beginning readers.
Professor Julius Nyikos of Washington and Jefferson College made a study of the spelling of English words in five standard desk-size dictionaries. He found 1768 ways of spelling 40 English phonemes! (A phoneme is the smallest sound in a language or dialect used to distinguish between syllables or words.) Only 40 are needed—one each! Furthermore, there is not one single spelling rule in English which does not have exceptions—some of the exceptions have exceptions! A computer programmed with all of the English spelling rules was able to spell correctly only about half of a list of common words.
English is not strictly an alphabetic language. English words are now logograms like Chinese picture writing. English words are represented with a certain combination of letters in a certain order just as certain combinations of strokes in a certain position represent a word or part of a word in Chinese. 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. Most people have a reading vocabulary of between 20,000 and 70,000 words. It is obviously far easier to learn the spelling of 38 phonemes and how to blend them into words than it is to learn the spelling of 20,000 or more words.
What Is the Only Proven Solution For Functional Illiteracy?
Dr. Frank Laubach, founder of Laubach Literacy International, taught adult illiterates around the world to read. He taught in more than 300 languages and even devised spelling systems for 220 languages that did not have a written language. He found that he could teach adults in 95% of the languages to read fluently in from one to twenty days. In some of the simpler languages, such as one or more dialects of the Philippine language, he could teach adults to read in one hour! He was able to teach adults, in languages other than English, to read in less than three months in 98% of the languages in which he taught. As far as grammar and syntax is concerned, English is neither among the simplest nor among the most difficult, but English spelling is by far the most confusing in the world. English grammar and syntax is simpler than several European languages, all of which can be learned in less than three months. Rudolph Flesch found that Russian school children are taught to read 46 of the 130 national languages of Russia in the first grade! There is no reading instruction, as such, after first grade. Dr. Laubach stated 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.” This may be somewhat optimistic, but they could certainly learn to read in less than three months—some students may require much less than three months.
Numerous scholars have been recommending correcting English spelling ever since 1755 when Dr. Samuel Johnson mistakenly froze the spelling of words in his well-received dictionary. Linguistic logic demands that the spelling of phonemes—not the spelling of words—is to be invariable because the pronunciation of many words changes with time. (If the sound of the word changes, but the spelling does not, the letters no longer represent the phonemes in word.) In addition, thirty-three nations both larger and smaller than the U.S. and both advanced and developing nations have simplified their spelling, and several distinguished scholars have thoroughly debunked every reasonable objection to spelling reform.
Literacy Research Associates, Inc. (a non-profit educational corporation) in cooperation with NuEnglish, Inc. (a non-profit educational corporation and a 509(a)(2) public charity) have perfected a phonetic spelling of English, called NuEnglish, such as Dr. Laubach recommended. Although there are thousands of spelling reform advocates, the vast majority of them want to use a spelling system that they personally developed or one with which they are already familiar and have publicly advocated. These spelling reform advocates and everyone who is compassionate about the problems that functional illiterates must constantly suffer are challenged to carefully, honestly examine the evidence presented in the page referenced in the left-hand column titled, “Why NuEnglish is the Optimum Spelling System.” This page offers irrefutable proof that NuEnglish is the simplest possible spelling system for beginning readers (who can learn to read in from one week to as much as three months) and can be learned by present readers in less than ten minutes.
Changing our spelling system will be easier than ever due to advances in computer technology (desk-top and prin
t-on-demand publishing and computer programs such as Respeller, free for all to use on our website http://nuenglish.org), but technology in non-English-speaking countries with higher literacy rates than English-speaking countries has also improved making international trade competition much more critical. Although the need for correcting our spelling system is now more critical due to international competition as developing nations rapidly change to become more competitive (our monthly trade deficit has grown steadily worse for several years), correcting our spelling has never been tried in English. Our students must, in effect, enter international markets with one hand tied behind their backs. Not only are more than 93 million Americans functionally illiterate, but also about 600 million of the more than 1.3 billion English-speaking around the world are functionally illiterate in English. English is spoken by more people than the dialect of any other language. English is used more than any other language to speak with those who do not speak a person’s native language. Dr. Laubach’s ground-breaking work has adequately proven that students can quickly learn to read when the words are all spelled phonemically. This is exactly what is needed to ease all the problems associated with traditional spelling and to make English even more of a universal language than it now is, greatly helping make communication between nations more trouble-free.
Although Proven, How Do We Know Spelling Reform Is the Only Solution That Will End Functional Illiteracy?
If you have read this far, you probably have thought of reasons why spelling reform “will not work.” Conventional wisdom (something that most people believe, even though that belief may be wrong—at one time, for example, conventional wisdom was that the earth was flat) is that the scholars have decided against spelling reform for good reasons. The truth is, as stated at the end of the second paragraph of the section immediately above, several distinguished scholars have thoroughly debunked every reasonable objection to spelling reform. Spelling reform, although successful in thirty-three other nations, has never been tried in English—even though the need for spelling reform is greater for English than for any of the thirty-three nations where it was instituted. Thomas R. Lounsbury, LL.D. L.H.D., emeritus professor of English, Yale University presented a very scholarly and thorough debunking of all reasonable objections to spelling reform in his book, English Spelling and Spelling Reform, published in 1909, apparently seen mostly by his peers. The book Let’s End Our Literacy Crisis, published in 2009, gives a summary of the answers to all the reasonable objections you may have thought of and several that you may not have thought of.
The need for English spelling reform began to be more obvious in the early 1920s when the whole word method of teaching reading began to be used, as teachers and students both began to be impatient with the boring memory work of learning the phonetic method of learning to read. This resulted, among other things, from the increasing diversity of pleasurable activities which took time away from the boring activity of learning the spelling of all the sounds in English and as increasing numbers of problems occurred as our culture became more complicated and as cultural problems diverted students attention away from the serious effort of learning to read. Instead of solving the problem by making the spelling logical, we have been fighting the symptoms of our ridiculous spelling system since 1755—new reading textbooks and reading programs come out every five years or so, there are frequent cries for better teachers and better teacher training, there are frequent requests for smaller class sizes and more money for education, while doing nothing about the cause of the problem: the illogical, inconsistent, and chaotic spelling.
Numerous scholars have emphasized the importance of logic in learning. Learning things that are illogical is much more difficult. For example, Edward Rondthaler and Edward Lias, in their book, Dictionary of simplified American Spellling state, “Systematic spelling takes full advantage of a well documented educational principle: logic stimulates thinking, thinking encourages learning, learning is facilitated when what is being learned ‘makes sense.’ A spelling that makes sense would open the door to literacy for more people, young and old, than all our remedial efforts put together. It would go a long way toward rescuing those who if not rescued will greatly magnify our social problems and undermine our democratic structure.” There is a familiar saying, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” We have not learned from almost a century of efforts to overcome the difficulties of English spelling instead of correcting it. How much more time are you willing to wait as we continue to avoid the one, inevitable solution, if we ever really want to solve the problem?
The details of the NuEnglish spelling system can be seen in the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuEnglish, and the proposed system of easily incorporating NuEnglish into English-speaking countries around the world is convincingly presented in the Revised Edition of Let’s End Our Literacy Crisis which was published in May 2009 by American University & Colleges Press, the publisher which totally financed the cost of publishing both the original and revised edition. See http://www.amazon.com/dp/1589824970.
For additional information, please visit our corporations’ home page at http://nuenglish.org (click the address on the blogroll in the right-hand column).