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!?

I disagree.

@CeeJay81 I noticed coloured a multipack of coloured overlays in a large Sainburys recently. Amazon is also a good shout.

DS1 had a brilliant y2 teacher and when she tried him with coloured overlays, she put the blue one down and he immediately read the page fluently for the first time. She looked absolutely elated when she told me. She'd never seen such an immediate difference in what a child could do before.
(DS2 needs green)

Alas now being top set y9 maths, he still writes the answer of 3x300 as P00. You can't win 'em all

When you were ten, you obviously had a much older reading age than that...

And while there would have been others like you, there would have been plenty of ten year olds who struggled with reading too, whose reading age would've been much lower.

It's important to grow and/or maintain reading levels so that you can do well in exams (which typically have papers with a reading age of 15/16) and read and comprehend complex documents.

When I was studying for my PGCE in the 1980s, my main project was about readability in the UK- the stats were the same then. I am sad that there has not been any improvement since then.

@JaninaDuszejko
You're right that reading skills do increase after the age of 16 or 18 but I think @tamade meant that these statistics don't account for that and possibly everyone reading "better than" an 18 year old is given a reading age of 18.
Of course if the OP posted a source we would understand this better.

I think in terms of Tom's Midnight Garden (or other examples) this is actually because adults have the life experience to understand the characters. There was a recent podcast where Isy Suttie interviewed Alain de Bottom and discussed this exact thing. Parents often cry when reading children's stories when a child won't as they don't see why it's sad. It's not to do with reading comprehension in my opinion.

Well, phonics is a load of crap for a start. My eldest did kumon before school and has a high reading age. My youngest I thought i would follow school phonics as school gave us flack for using kumon for the oldest and he is well behind. I think phonics is not a great way to learn.

I agree. My son was an avid reader until school absolutely killed his interest by their obsession with writing styles, author's interpretations, etc. He just liked reading books for the sake of reading books, learning new things, etc. It was all the "technical" teaching that put him off reading and he's not actually read a book since age of about 13!

I am an English teacher and the test that we use to measure reading ability has a maximum age of 14 which means that you can read as an adult at age 14.

We compare the reading age with the chronological age so if a 12 year old has a reading age of 9 then they are ‘behind’ and we would give them extra support and reading programmes to help them improve.

If you take the population as a whole you have to remember that even when I was at school you could leave once you turned 16 even if you hadn't taken your exam yet, dyslexia wasn't recognised as much either. Plenty of people are resist education past primary school even if they attend with parents not seeing the point, it's only certain sections of the population but I've seen it myself.

I've noticed in the last year or two, more parents bringing books to read while their children do activities. I think a tide is turning on digitial vs tradtitional media and people have peaked on digital forms.

DS was doing a Warhammer workshop recently so I took in my current book to bide my time. A nice meaty fantasy tome with a dragon on the cover and had several conversations with the staff about it and the fantasy genre in general. It was always going to be an interesting topic in the Warhammer community

When DS2 goes to tutoring, my book and I go off to the pub for a coke together. The bar man's been interested in my progress through the series as I've gradyally worked my way through different coloured dragons on the covers.

I'm a re-reader because the experience does change over life experience. They're like reunions with old friends.

The most hitting change was The Railway Children after my dad died when I was 11. Every single time since, the words "oh my daddy!" have me sobbing. Just typing them like that makes me well up.

Books can be so emotionally powerful!

The thing is though most 9-11 year olds can read fairly well so it's not necessarily that low in ability. My dyslexic dd was reading children's chapter books at that age

@Bluevelvetsofa
The GOV study mentioned earlier seems to back this up?
Older generations would have been much less likely to stay on at school and many left at 14 (my parents did) to go into work.

It's not a suprise that the reading level is what it is. There are going to be a lot of factors dragging it down. What's the maximum reading age? Presumably a healthy 25 year old, 50 year old and 75 year old would be expected to have a similar kind of reading age. It's not something that keeps growing. A 70 year old doesn't have a reading age of 70, surely, it'd be 18 or 21 or something. Is it mean, median or mode? And if you include babies, that'd bring the average down, or the increasing percentage of the population who don't speak English as a first language. Plus lots of people are just plain stupid.

Well - who decides what reading ages are? Clearly if most of the adult population has a reading age of 9 to 11, then 9 to 11 is a faulty designation. Or the level is sufficient for adults to function in society.

If it is a cause for concern, then what price OfSted and all the government interference in setting levels and SATs? We were told that academies and SATs and endless control over curricula would raise standards - doesn't sound as though any of that has worked!

Maybe we need to ditch all this stuff and let teachers teach - let them use their professional skills, imagination and understanding of their pupils to create programmes for learning to read that are fun and engender enthusiasm rather than children being written off as below standard (whose?) and losing heart. So many children are put off school by a narrow curriculum based on the prep/public school model of our politicians - this is what needs addressing. It must be soul-destroying for teachers to be in the grip of this stranglehold, to have to teach to tests and fill in endless paperwork.

I didn't know this, but if the majority of schools are "teaching" the same way they do at DS's school, it doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

There's a difference between reading age and comprehension age. I read very early and widely (I was reading adult books when I was a pre teen). I could read them and understand the basic story but I couldn't understand any of the undertones or nuances because I simply didn't have the life experience. I had a MASSIVE vocab though. But people gave me books to read that I couldn't appreciate because I just hadn't got the frame of reference to enjoy them. I finally came to like Jane Austen once I was over 40, before that she was just an over-wordy author with too many characters.

Oh you have reminded me of a project I worked on many years ago. This was an IT project for one of the major banks. As part of this project they were creating a whole load of new forms and information leaflets. All of this had to be checked by another contractor who was from the Plain English Society.

He only came in to the office about once a month and nobody could remember his name, so he was universally referred to as "that plain Englishman"!

I can believe it, when I look at my local Facebook page it's hard to understand what some people are asking, due to poor spelling, grammar and sentence construction. I didn't have a great education but I loved reading which my parents encouraged, we used our local library every week as we didn't have much money to buy books. I think the rise of the Internet has something to do with it, declining attention spans, and if parents don't enjoy reading then children don't pick up on it.

YEARS ago, when my parents took The Sunday Times, I would have to read it in conjunction with the OED
Many of the words made convolutions in the narrative, requiring a second read, sometimes it was easier to ask my Dad as he seemed to understand a more archaic syntax. He would complete the Times crosswords swiftly and effortlessly, won £50 occasionally.

Mostly he would say look it up - we had a good etymological dictionary, or ‘what do you think it means’ which as young teen doesn’t seem too helpful but of course aids comprehension, no use repeating the word without understanding.

We were all readers by nature, a good local library attended weekly, excellent inspirationalEnglish teacher, an important influence.

We were regularly mocked for our use of ‘big words’ .
possibly by Sun readers, one of whom, boasted!that he had
never read a book, his argument being, that reading was a waste of time.

This difference also creates an impasse in the use of cultural references against
literary references : we have learned to keep quiet as Sun readers are everywhere
it seems.

@Bluevelvetsofa
I can't post a screenshot but this is some of the literacy data and age group

Age group England mean score OECD average mean score
Aged 16-19 *276 267
Aged 20-24 281 274
Aged 25-34 *285 272
Aged 35-44 *274 265
Aged 45-54 *262 256
Aged 55-65 259. 241
Asterisk () indicates the difference between England and OECD

I actually sobbed my heart out at Aslan dying in the Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. I was 8 or 9 I think. Also at The Little Matchstick Girl.

I lived for reading and spent all my pocket money on books.
Child of the 70s.

@BurntBroccoli I have found that those most likely to post on the local Facebook page, with little apparent knowledge or understanding of grammar and punctuation are in the younger age group. Anecdotally obviously.

This morning, there was a post from an 18 year old, looking for a job. It was one long sentence, with no punctuation or grammar. Had it been an application, it’s not something I would have considered.

I won’t argue with the statistics, but they do not reflect my experience.

Some people never do manage to acquire fluent reading skills. I once taught a boy who had a reading age of 8.7 at 11, which was down to 7.8 in Year 10. He wasn't particularly bright, but he was able to survive in low-skilled jobs later.

I used to love reading time on the carpet!

My Mum and Dad used to read to me every night and encouraged me to read by myself. When I started primary school the headteacher called my Mum in and asked her to cut back on reading at home as I was finding the reading books at school too easy and was ahead of a lot of the other children. Needless to say Mum refused.

And a lot of them can't spell or write coherently. It's a problem that affects the population as a whole. People read and write* a lot less than before, so they are losing these skills.

• without the help of software tools