To ask what you think your reading level might be?

[2023a]

I think lots of us have had the odd frustrating conversation on here, where the other person just hasn’t seemed to be able to grasp what we’re saying. Apparently, it’s very possible that the posters in question genuinely don’t understand.

A 2011 government survey of adult literacy skills found that 14.9% (or 1 in 7) of adults in England have literacy levels at or below Entry Level 3, which is equivalent to the literacy skills expected of a nine to 11-year-old.

More recently, in 2015, the OECD conducted its Survey of Adult Skills, known as PIAAC (Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies). This survey found that 16.4% (or 1 in 6) of adults in England, and 17.4% (or 1 in 5) adults in Northern Ireland, have literacy levels at or below Level 1, which is considered to be 'very poor literacy skills'.

More info here, if you’re interested: literacytrust.org.uk/parents-and-families/adult-literacy/what-do-adult-literacy-levels-mean/

No, the marker quite literally told me they ‘didn’t know’ the phrase I’d used. It wasn’t particularly unusual.

I’m more than capable of taking critique, I’ve just spent an entire degree doing so and learning from it. I certainly wouldn’t have achieved a first without the capacity and willingness to do so.

My current qualification allows for formative feedback on entire essays, hence the ability to change the first paper. The second I wrote in much less academic language. It was then understood.

Sometimes, just sometimes, students do know more than ‘teachers.’ (This person does not have a doctorate and is not a lecturer. They are a freelance business owner, used to mark this work. They are notorious within previous cohorts for being bad at it). One student was told they weren’t writing at masters level. That student had graduated with a masters at distinction level two weeks before. It’s deeply problematic for the course to be honest.

I'm a 4 or 5 on that second scale - I've been a 5 in the past, I used to work in a branch of the civil service where we wrote monthly stats reports that were so closely pored over by the press that you could spend half a day trying to get approval for the placement of a comma! I also have a PhD in a hard science subject, I speak German fluently and I really like reading for fun.

Often on here I suspect people of wilfully misunderstanding an OP so they can put the most negative interpretation possible into their behaviour and thereby win fight club AIBU. I find it quite triggering - my mother, if there was a misunderstanding in what I was saying, would always assume the most negative interpretation was true - it happened to me so often that I have real problems to believe my own interpretations of emotional situations, particularly if they are a bit complicated. I have a voice in my head saying "but isn't it just X", aren't you just jealous, or aren't you just being lazy or whatever. It's actually happening as I'm writing this, my mother's voice going "she thinks her tendency to make excuses for her own behaviour is because her mother left school at 14". So yeah, that's fun.
But anyway, maybe I will try and look harder at AIBU and at least consider the idea that misunderstanding is sometimes genuine.

I also thought what was interesting about this is, I think there are more ways to develop an insight and understanding of the world than having an advanced reading age. Some of my family who have quite technical jobs but who left school at 16, also have that sort of subtlety of thought, without necessarily ever having done anything on that reading skills list about synthesising complex texts or whatever.

While there is a lot of misreading of posts that goes on in here, I always think that logical fallacies are a much bigger problem. They are much harder to tackle than pointing out that someone has missed out or misunderstood a crucial from a post. I’ve met well-read people who can’t argue a point logically, as well of course as people who do this on purpose, knowing how crazy-making it is to respond to. So not really a reading comprehension issue.

That said, another thing I find infuriating on here is how black and white many posters are, particularly when it comes to judging who is right or wrong in a given situation. I do wonder if reading might have a part to play here as it strikes me that more complex literature, film, etc., deals with moral ambiguity, whereas easier stuff tends to clearly flag what is good and bad and present more obvious characters and situations.

Haha that's taken me right back to GCSE French and Spanish - in French they kept telling us "well that requires a subjunctive but it's too complicated to grasp we don't do the subjunctive until A level" which made us think it was some terribly complex grammatical tense which didn't exist in English. In Spanish they just said that requires the subjunctive and taught us it.

And then when I got to A level French and then on the degree level and actually understood the subjunctive mood and the nuance between mood and tense, and realised of course we can grasp that concept or nuance in English too, my GCSE teachers were just a bit crap.

But I think that that's a really good point about conditionality, and hadn't previously thought about the fact people might not understand that. Well they certainly wouldn't if they'd had similar teachers to my GCSE French ones at school because I don't think they understood it either - they certainly weren't able to explain it as something which exists in English, they literally were just "this is a complicated tense in French which we don't cover at GCSE".
Mind you, I recall that I've mainly learned about English language through studying English literature and foreign languages. I just don't think we're taught that much about English language so it's no wonder there are high levels of poor literacy skills.

I'm a writer, and have been given editorial advice on how to simplify my writing because I tend to use longer sentences and descriptions.

The editor emphasised that the common reading level is very much lower than you might expect, and shorter sentences help people navigate the work more easily.

I work in tech too, and I think that there's a growing ability to mask low literacy levels with technology. Buttons, symbols, alerts, autocorrect all help people tap through processes without actually taking it in.

My degree is in Linguistics with much of my coursework in Literature. It is high.

That said, I have been a primary teacher and I would suspect that many adults (and children) have reading levels lower than those expected of Year 6. The expectations of inference and understanding of complicated language structure is far too high.

I suspect mine is high. I was reading at 3, according to my parents, and was supposed to be put up a year after year 2 at school, until they realised I had an August birthday and decided that the age gap would be too big.

I had the reading age of an adult before I took my 11+, and years later did some tests at work that said I'm in the 95th centile for verbal critical reasoning. I'm not convinced about that though, as they also said I was in the 90th centile for numerical reasoning, which came as a bit of a surprise.

Thanks for posting the link to the judgment @CatnaryReturns - it’s very interesting to see the efforts the judge has made. I would think that it would still be beyond the capabilities of a significant section of the population.

In my work I frequently have to push colleagues to write in plainer language, and there is a lot of resistance.

Here’s an example of something I think is extremely clever - someone has really thought it through: creative-contracts.com/clemengold/

I had this experience quite frequently through school and university!

I have quite enjoyed learning to express myself with differing levels of complexity for the context though.

I've found on MN that you need a very clear pitch in the first sentence of your response on AIBU! Almost like an abstract.

Was discussing the lack of the ability to think conditionally (aka abstract thought) with DBro ages ago and he'd read something about it being linked to things like racism and sexism because the perpetrator's can't place themselves in the victim's place (he was reading historic stuff from the 50s about this). But I'm sure he'd said that the ability to think abstractly was increasing over time partly due to increased formal education.

There was a discussion on here a few years ago about improving educational attainment and some amazing work had been done in the US by schools in deprived areas having an after school club or breakfast club (can't remember which) where they played board games that resulted in massive improvements in attainment across the curriculum and improvements in behaviour. The thinking was that playing board games improved the ability to think abstractly (and therefore empathetically).

Think that's quite positive, that a) abstract thought can be improved in a fairly simple way and b) that it can have an impact on education but also on social cohesion. It does raise the question though that a PP touched on obliquely that is high level reading is a side effect of logical and abstract thought rather than something that can be taught through traditional literacy programmes and we need to include skills more associated with STEM if we want to increase literacy.

Probably linked to the concept of wisdom as well, DH and I are both finding in our 50s that the more abstract skills we learnt in our PhDs are becoming more useful as we become more and more senior at work, he's particularly aware of it because his work is not directly linked to his PhD so for years his excess education was seen as a downside rather than an upside. But in more senior strategic jobs the ability to link different ideas become more and more useful.

I am probably a level 5 reader. I write extremely detailed minutes for a living. I remember being told I had the reading age of a 16 year old when I was 8, I was raised by older grandparents with a readers digest obsession. I do not read so much these days as I often find stories boring or contrived. I like older books.

However my comprehension of the spoken language is often not good. I understand this and compensate a lot for it in my writing, I keep things extremely factual. In real life I often hear subtleties which I am told by others aren’t really there. This is probably due to negative life experience bias. Either way I recognise it and try to compensate for it.

This is such an interesting thread.

That's interesting about playing board games resulting in improvement in attainment and behaviour. DD is in 5th grade this year and they started doing special courses throughout the year one afternoon a week, various different things but one of the courses was board games, where they played board games every Tuesday afternoon. Perhaps they had heard of this trial when they were deciding what themes to do for these special courses.

I think literacy is quite high on here, but some people are too lazy to read posts properly.

It does raise the question though that a PP touched on obliquely that is high level reading is a side effect of logical and abstract thought rather than something that can be taught through traditional literacy programmes and we need to include skills more associated with STEM if we want to increase literacy.

It’s an interesting idea but I think you’d be surprised how many people in STEM have relatively poor literacy skills, my dp included. I think the skills needed to work with numbers and computer code are quite different to those needed for literacy.

@Makemetry I work in STEM so it wouldn't surprise me 😁.

Level 5
My entire family are avid readers.
I started reading at 3 and never stopped.
Learning is my all time favorite activity.

A few times on MN, I've seen people who seem to struggle with abstract thinking.

I have an MSc so I'd like to think I'm level 5!

Do those statistics take into account people who weren't born or educated here, or for whom English is not their first language?

The thing is, most of the people who respond are likely to be - or think they are (which may not be the same) - level 5. For all sorts of reasons.

I say that as someone who (perhaps hubristically!) would self assess as level 5. I could evidence that too. But there are also situations where I underperform to various degrees and for various reasons.

In my professional life, I often have to consider other people’s literacy levels. And their reasoning and problem solving capabilities too. Generally it’s best to assume all of the above are weaker than people would like to believe. Especially once you start to consider the wider circumstances in which you’re expecting them to function.

No idea. I’d assume it only relates to people educated in the U.K., as I’m not sure how else they’d gather the information.

Anecdotally, though, people for whom English is a second or third language often have a better grasp of the finer linguistic points than people for whom it’s the first. Just in my experience.

This has turned into such an interesting thread!

That explains a lot of the posts on here where people get fixated on bizarre and irrelevant details.

My mum is not a native English speaker but her grasp of the language is definitely superior than many native speakers. She did study linguistics at University though.

I have two Facebook friends who always use been when they mean being and I can't tell you how much it winds me up. Other SPAG errors don't bother me as much as this one!