To be shocked that the national average reading age is 9-11

[SailorSerena]

I often think why are people finding this confusing? It's not difficult! Did any of these posters even read the OP!? When reading threads here. On another thread I saw someone say so you know what the national average reading age is? When peoples comprehension was criticised. So I googled it. And I'm appalled!

How on earth is the UKs reading ability so poor that the average adult has the reading ability of a 10 year old child!?

If I remember correctly, after about the age of 10 'reading age' has less meaning, it's the level of comprehension which matters. I could successfully read a page of German or French but how much I would comprehend of what I was reading would be variable, depending on the subject.

If this has been addressed further down the thread then I apologise!

I was using my blue overlay in a uni lecture when the lecturer was making his rounds.

He stopped and asked me how I had made the photocopied handout clearer?

They are amazing.

Yes definitely.
When I was at primary school in the 70s, there were children who were clearly dyslexic (looking back) or who needed more help but were just dumped on the 'naughty' table.

Those same children are now in their late 50s and posting on Facebook with absolutely no sense of grammar or punctuation or it seems understanding.

Thankfully!

Reading age is essentially a standardised score in the NGRT, it's the main metric by which we gatekeep and deliver interventions.

I think that there are two very distinct populations post 18: those that leave education and don't read for work or pleasure regularly and those that go on to higher education and continue reading (and writing) complex texts as they age. The first group will probably just maintain their reading skills over time but the later group will continue to develop skills even if that's only in niche areas (e.g. I could interpret and critique a biochemical scientific paper better at the end of my DPhil than I could at 18 when I'd never read one).

The standard tests are designed to assess the majority of the population and identify those that are struggling. I can see that there's probably not much point assessing the reading ability of a professor vs an A level student but it is possible, just like we can measure IQ at levels well above average. Indeed IQ tests include verbal reasoning and comprehension.

Haven't read the full thread, but saw some earlier posts about language being dumbed down and how that's a shame, and standards should be raised.

I'm a writer for the government. It's true we write for a 9-11yr reading age but it's not just because that's the average reading age.

If you think about the kind of things you use gov.uk for – applying for a passport, booking a driving test, doing your tax return – these are tasks you want to get done as quickly and painlessly as possible. Ensuring these services contain the most easy-to-process language is the best way to achieve that.

Literally millions of people use gov.uk every day (NHS website is another good example). Many will have low literacy levels, but others will have cognitive or visual impairments, and many will be stressed, anxious or be situationally disadvantaged (imagine you were a Ukrainian in the first days after the war broke out, trying to apply for a refugee visa in a second language on your phone while sitting on the ground in a freezing railway station with only 7% battery remaining, etc). You just need it to be absolutely straightforward and quick.

Other people might not speak English as their main language, or they may be autistic and find jargon, euphemisms, metaphors etc hard to process. If your first language is sign language, some vocabulary might not be as familiar. If you have a motor impairment and cannot use a mouse, it's much easier to navigate a web page when there are simpler sentences with fewer words.

Testing and research has also shown that lawyers, academics and other 'high-intellect' professionals far prefer simple, clear language when interacting with 'official' information, like government, health and financial services. Yet these are often the same people who accuse me of dumbing down!

Obviously language and vocabulary is a beautiful thing, and reading is one of life's greatest pleasures. But for the majority of our daily routine encounters with words, writing aimed at 9-11 yr olds is best for almost everyone.

For the third time - the source is the Scottish government website. It was linked in one of my previous posts.

An awful lot of adult immigrants do not bother to learn spoken English even to A1 or A2 level. I mean people who get flustered if you greet them. How good is their reading comprehension going to be?

It boggles my mind how you'd want to live somewhere like that and not know what was going on around you. When I lived overseas the first thing I did was study the local language intensively.

That doesn't surprise me in the slightest actually.

I'm a primary school teacher, and from what I've seen and heard (both anecdotally and from my own experiences), if you're not a fluent reader by the time you finish year 6, you're unlikely to progress much further. Secondary schools just aren't set up to offer reading/phonics support. If you didn't "get it" during your primary years, you're fairly close to fucked.

I've worked in some quite deprived areas and have heard parents reading letters home and school reports etc, in very disjointed, low-level ways. There are a lot less fluent readers out there than you'd think.

But steps need to be taken in school to prevent the children currently there becoming non-reading adults. Thats why people are discussing it. Obviously adult education is important too but there isn't a 'captive' audience.

Actually I know someone who was a lawyer in Turkey. He is trying to improve his spoken English but manages well with written English as it gives him more time to process and isn't subject to the vagaries of local accent and dialect.

I think this is why there is so much rubbish on the tv. Or the population might not understand it!

Much of it seems at a really basic level of English.

I belive it is, but l wasn't aware that there was a race to the bottom. We can't do anything about literacy rates in the USA, but we can and must do everything we can to raise them in this country.
@BarkLife, it sounds as if you teach in a very good school. Thank you for your clear explanations.
It's interesting that several posters have said that literacy rates are higher now than in the past. I am not sure about that. There have always been people who have left school unable to read and write for a variety of reasons. There was quite a big problem in the years following WW2, for example, as so many evacuees had been moved from pillar to post and not settled in one place for long enough to get a meaningful education.
In the seventies, it was realised that there were a lot of adults who had slipped through the net for one reason or another. To try and help mitigate this, there was a weekly TV series called On the Move, which was designed to teach adults to read by using various work and real life situations.
However, at the other end of the scale, there were many people who left school at fourteen or fifteen but sought to better themselves by way of night schools after work. They were also avid readers in their spare time and big users of not only public libraries, but what were known as circulating libraries, where a small subscription was paid for them to borrow books. It was not unusual for a miner, say, to have read Dickens. I have some copies of books by different authors of that calibre that belonged to my great-grandparents in the late nineteenthand early twentieth century, who had very ordinary jobs and would have left school at fourteen. Even in my generation, at school in the seventies to early eighties, I think most of us read a lot more than a lot of people do today. I have always been a voracious reader and still am. I was talking recently with a friend who is a present day secondary school English teacher. We were comparing the expectations of the old O level English literature syllabus and the GCSE syllabus. I said that one of the novels we studied, and I loved, was Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd. He said that, very sadly, most of today's GCSE pupils would find it too difficult. I went to a bog-standard comprehensive school, admittedly in the top set - but there were 35+ pupils in the class.

The people around here are not Turkish lawyers lol, but largely elderly uneducated relatives from Bangladesh and Pakistani.

But as a general point not being fluent speaking doesn't mean being completely ignorant of the written language. I'm the same as far as Spanish goes.

Anyway, not particularly relevant to this thread.

It is and it isn't. Some of these people are illiterate in their own language.

How do you know steps need taking? We're talking about adults who can read at the same level as 9 to 11 year olds. Many of those adults haven't been to school for decades so the problem could reflect teaching decades ago if anything. It certainly has no reflection on teaching now.

@SailorSerena that website isn't the source of the statistic though is it? It's just quoting a statistic.
Which itself only relates to Scotland, not the rest of the UK.

@BurntBroccoli
Of course. Non fiction often has a higher reading age. We have a huge amount of non fiction in the school library a lot children love it.
All reading is reading. Including manga which I don't get at all but the children do. Many of our students who gain the highest exam results read manga.

It is shocking!

But I'm not that surprised - not so much here (sometimes but not often) but read Facebook comments and you get a flavour of where the nations literacy is at. Or at least that sector of people who comment.

We're going on a cruise holiday and I joined a P&O facebook group, and I'm shocked at the literacy on there from the mainly older contingent.

This is SUCH a good point. Despite what I said a lot earlier in the thread, it's actually really important that certain texts are accessible for everyone... So the reading age of the .gov sites SHOULD be where they are. It would be ridiculous for them to be anything else.

This is a good point too - I have had a few robust discussions with friends about health advice for babies, because they weren't getting that:

A) advice has to be written to a clarity everyone understands
B) it has to be factually correct to a degree
C) it has to be safe for everyone to follow advice

So the Calpol dose or the salt intake has to be the one that's safe for the smallest and most fragile babies, the ones with the weakest immune systems etc.

The same goes for all WHO advice etc - they have to make a message that's clear for the entire world to understand.

If you honestly can't comprehend that there are reading ages beyond age 10, just because you were consuming adult books at age 10, that then raises questions about your ability to think and reason surely.

No need to be so snide.

I’m not an English teacher so I’m happy to be corrected, but the entire concept of reading age - and especially the random stat in th OP - sounds like a load of meaningless nonsense to me. I was trying to make the point that a ‘reading age of 10’ is going to mean completely different things to different people, and the score awarded will change anyway depending on which test system is utilised. Many test ranges only go up to 13/14yrs. So it’s not like a 25 year old can be tested and given a reading age of 25 anyway.