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!?

It's not just literacy though is it?

Just the other week a contestant on Mastermind (Mastermind!) was asked what the cube root of 8 was. He threw his hands in the air and looked like he had been slapped in the face with a wet fish.

I mean, it's not exactly A level maths is it? As far as I can remember we did this very early at secondary school and these days I think it might even be introduced in Y6. How can someone go through at least 11 years of school, possibly 13, maybe even University, and be so floored by such basic knowledge.

I expect he panicked. I know I would in that bloody chair, I’d probably have difficulty remembering my name.

Reading isn't just reading words and understanding them. Reading is a complex skill and true understanding is all about the comprehension of a text.

I have worked with many functionally illiterate adults. Yes they can read things in their day to day environment, yes they can get by, they can send and read texts messages, use social media, understand simple letters. They cannot however comprehend anything with deeper complexity. They can read the words but that doesn't mean they truly understand. Wittgenstein said "if a lion could speak English we would not understand him."

Some people achieve a primary school level of education in English and then cannot function higher than this. I have had the pain of trying to teach a class of young adults reading Of Mice and Men. Of course they could read the words, but could they understand the text on a deeper level? Absolutely not. They had to be spoon fed absolutely everything, and for most of it I may as well have been trying to communicate with a lion. The world of a functionally illiterate adult is different to that of a genuinely literate adult. I think until you really work with people like that it can be hard to understand.

I remember showing my father some of the essays I had written that received good marks at university. He's an intelligent but not university educated man. He could read and understand, he was interested, anything he didn't immediately follow he asked me about. Compare with his father... an uneducated man who left school at 14. He can read, but he would never be able to understand the essays. If you asked him to read them aloud, he could of course do that. But it might as well have been written in French. He wouldn't have even known where to begin to ask questions about it.

I'm fascinated by this - I used to work in education and took a mild interest in readability measures. The Scottish link includes some online readability tools. Using the SMOG Index Readability Calculator from this link (US-based?) I get:

Recent Sun online article (first para).
www.thesun.co.uk/motors/33229556/oil-spill-motorway-closure-somerset/

9.73 (Easy to Read) )

First paragraph of Proust's 'A la Recherche...'

13.43 (Fairly Easy to Read)

OU Intro to their Art History MA
www.open.ac.uk/postgraduate/qualifications/f33

19.03 (Fairly Easy to Read)

Buyer beware and all that. Can anyone find a text that gets a score of 211+ (Extremely Difficult)?

I remember reading somewhere that the tabloids were aimed at a reading age of 7-8. It shocked me at the time but doesn’t surprise me now.

I’ve learned, after some years on MN not to over complicate posts because they are often misinterpreted. Not suggesting that MNetters struggle with reading but like verbal interactions they often don’t “listen” to what is being said/written.

An average reading age of 10 also means that half the population have a reading age lower than 10. Some will be due to dyslexia and other SEN but others will be due to illiteracy.

One of the most popular series of books recently was “Fifty shades”, for some women I know it was the only series of books they have ever read. The author had been very clever to target the average reader.

JKR’s Harry Potter series was aimed at 10yr olds but was very popular with adults probably because it was an easy read. However, Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” is aimed at the more advanced reader. So people are often disappointed when they attempt it after watching the films. DS was an advanced reader, he read the final book of the trilogy at age 10 because he wanted to know what happened while waiting for the final film to be released on TV.

Some people are readers and some are not. Like most pastimes the more you engage the better you become. I spent my childhood immersed in books. My mum would ban me from reading after midnight because I would happily read all night as a child.
Now I struggle to stay awake so have started using Audiobooks, I’ve just started listening to “Normal Women” by Phillipa Gregory. It is fascinating.

It is alarming. I fear it has far reaching consequences across all sectors. A basic ability to understand maths/science/history etc is tied in with the comprehension of the words being used within the lesson.

Sadly, I think the underfunding of schools and loss of textbooks is an additional factor. We took our books with us, we had to read them and learn from them. I think it was harder to fly under the radar.

True, but not knowing the cube root of 8 will not affect most people in their daily lives. But when your English comprehension skills are very poor it has a huge impact on your life, how you take in information, and ultimately how you navigate the world and relate to others.

It’s about being able to understand and interpret what you are reading. Unfortunately many people really struggle with that.

Guess it depends how good a reader you were at that age, I wasn't the average reader (started very early, speed reader) so my reading age at 11 wasn't equivalent to an average 11yo. If that makes sense!

I find it's not a thing that's.. prized though. So many comments when I read about "are you reading that, you can't be reading it properly"
Accused of lying by teachers
Mum had friends falling out with her when I was a child over it as they accused her of coaching me
She didn't even teach me to read, I just could and don't ever remember not being able to

The average adult apparently reads at around level 1, which is equivalent to GCSE grade D-F and is what is expected of the average 11-14 year old. So not as bad as that headline figure!

Source: https://library.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2020/08/Health-literacy-how-to-guide.pdf

The Numeracy version of this is interesting to me, especially the appointment times examples.

7 year old: would not understand appointment times written in a letter.
9 year old: could understand appointment times written in whole hours using the 12-hour clock, eg 9am but not 9:15am or 13.00 hours.
11 year old: could understand appointment times written in the 12 hour clock eg 9:15 but not 14:15.
Level 1, GCSE grade D - F: able to understand appointment times using the 12 hour and 24 hour clock.

That’s more useful than the cube root of 8, in my opinion.

Edit: I’m still referring to this document , which three of us have mentioned now so it must be doing well in google search results 😀

Unless you are quite stupid, yes your reading has improved since you were 11. You are thinking of the skill of being able to read. Reading is not a skill that's achieved and then 👏🏻 job done 👏🏻

When we talk about the population having an average reading age of a primary school child, this refers to their ability to comprehend deeper meanings in text beyond simply having the ability to read what it says.

Illiterate means not being able to read. Functionally illiterate people can read words, but they do not have decoding or comprehension skills beyond a primary school level.

Think that source is about 10 years old but I can’t see that there would have been a massive decrease in literacy since then!

Interestingly I've seen a lot of reports saying that more and more teens and young adults cannot read analogue clocks.

And also the average adult by definition reads at the level of an average adult…

Well no, it really isn't as simple as that. Reading is more than decoding words. You need to have comprehension skills as well.

Indeed, it refers to the 2015 proposed changes to GCSE grades.

Perhaps a decrease due to missing education during Covid times, but that will have affected the education of relatively few people who are now adults.

A decade ago I worked on a project that required putting together comms that were accessible to all adults across the UK and one of the requirements from the Govt dept that commissioned it was that all written English needed to be at or below Entry Level 3 (roughly year 6 at school so 11yrs old) because that was the national average attainment for Literacy skills.

This isn't new and unfortunately it seems there's been little improvement in the last 10 years.

Many people will be able to read something that’s written in short sentences and simple words (like The Sun, as it’s been mentioned here!). But they wouldn’t be able to read The Guardian/Telegraph etc.

Tbh I cant read the Guardian either so I have sympathies 😂

Way back it was said the Sun newspaper aimed at a reading age of 12, so that sounds about right. I mean 1990s, if not earlier.

Replace K with S in your second word for accuracy.

I have had a head injury and post concussion syndrome which resulted in me losing my ability to read, which was incredibly frustrating and actually pretty frightening as someone who wrote as an editor/magazine journalist for a living.

I love words, books and creative writing, and was an above average avid reader, devouring books as a child. Now, I actually find it very hard to sustain any length of time reading long prose, and sadly if I tried to read a novel in one sitting, it'd be impossible.

I just don't have the reading stamina any more, which is something that devastated me a lot when it first happened. I still feel depressed about how I lost my mind's eye, when I banged my head too, which was an integral part of me enjoying reading.

I have to say, my alexia (loss of reading ability) was one of the most difficult things to deal with, and I'd literally give anything to turn back time and not have a head injury. My degree involved a lot of reading too, and I'd never be able to do it as well now.

Reading is such a key skill and to lose it is absolutely awful. If you enjoy reading, I salute you.

It’s sad but not surprising.

It is also really quite easy to fall into that category. At age 18 when I was tested for dyslexia, my reading age was 11 (despite a fairly high IQ). I could not read a broadsheet newspaper but had got through school without it being flagged as a particular concern because I was so good at maths (so no one worried about my English).

I was very lucky as I got tested, diagnosed, and then got lots of extra help at uni. But most people don’t get that, and remain at that level.

they’ll be huge swathes of people with a low reading age for a variety of reasons. I do wonder whether some of the problem is that the focus in English at secondary. I recall it being lots of stuff around poetry and analysing language - and far too little on the basics of sentence construction and spelling.

This is a sad but very interesting topic..
Do you think the majority of people with low literacy / comprehension skills could improve with more reading practice or is it a case of levelling out & this is where they are now?