Half of Americans can’t read

[Balalabab]

So the title is slightly clickbaity I feel.

But this is what is being said in a podcast I am listening to called ‘Sold a story’.

Ironic if the title is wrong considering the name of the podcast 😂

Anyway.. story goes that in Covid a bunch of adults all over the US realised their children couldn’t actually read.

What they had been taught to do was learn a bunch of words by sight, and then as reading became more complex they would look at the first few letters and guess from the context.

One of the example given was instead of ‘Poland was invaded by Germany.’ Someone who used this method read ‘Poland was invited by Germany.’

This reminded me of a story my in-law told me (he is mid 60s) of how he couldn’t actually read. And it was only when he went to his grammar school interview and asked to read a text did they recognised he couldn’t actually read. He knew he couldn’t read. That made absolutely no sense to me until I heard this podcast about people who are effectively half reading. Going through the motions and faking it. But who actually cannot read.

My mind is blown. And I am gripped by this rabbit hole.

In America; this ‘whole word’ method of reading has been a political war for the past 60 years. Politicised to be a left vs right issue and has now been called by some ‘The reading wars’. I have asked tried to ask on Reddit about this 3 times and every time it has been deleted. I don’t know if that’s denial of the issue, embarrassment, or just Reddit being Reddit.

Anyway this has really captured me. Has America fixed this? Do we have this problem in UK as we were using this teaching method many years ago too? How many British people can’t actually read? Whats going to happen to the Gen Z’s who can’t read!

And finally a down the rabbit hole fact for you - that image of Bush sitting in a classroom when 9/11 happened. The most famous image of Bush seen by nearly everyone in the developed world. He was in that school because he was trying to ban ‘whole word’ learning and push phonics first learning. This has really has been an invisible elephant in the room.

I believe that the last bastion of Latin learning in Fife (and one of the last in Scotland) is Kirkcaldy High School, thanks to one charismatic teacher who rebuilt the department from scratch. (I think that she was originally there to teach another subject.)

I took Latin in another Fife school and we lost our Latin teacher when he got the HoD job at Kirkcaldy in the late '70s. I'm not sure what happened between then and now.

Our school did replace our teacher, but he didn't last very long and that was the end of Latin there.

Wow, doing more reading about this and it really is just incredible…

That’s absolutely astonishing.

It’s so hard to fathom “guessing” a word from the first couple of letters. I mean, I know young children try to do it, my 6 year old does it if she’s rushing through, but you stop, get them to go back, and try again slowly.

To think that is the norm to teenagers is wild.

I can remember telling my kids not to do this exact thing when reading. I'd say no, don't guess, read. There are words with the same three letters but completely different meanings.

It’s surely extremely simplistic to say that if 50% of Americans learned to read via the “whole word” method this means 50% of Americans “can’t read”? We didn’t do phonics when I learned to read so I assume we learned whole word but I can read just fine as can the vast majority of people my age?

Exactly, so who is just letting these children guess without correcting them and telling them to try again?

Correct. The thread title is deliberately goady and offensive to garner attention.

I suspect any method can potentially work with good oversight from a competent reader. I know I didn't do phonics and must have done a whole word method but still learned to read just fine.

I wonder if phonics is the best bet for someone that doesn't have a parent making sure that they aren't just guessing because it teaches some rules that can be transferred to other words and doesn't need pictures for context.

I think if no one bar a parent is checking, then the education system really needs looking at. Surely teachers should also be listening to children read and correcting them at school.

Are they saying that?

Stats I see are alone these lines:
CategoryPercentage of US Adults
Total Illiteracy ~4% or lower
Cannot read or write simple sentences at all.
Functional Illiteracy 21% to 28%
Can read basic vocabulary but cannot fill out medical forms, follow multi-step instructions, or read a map.
Below Proficient 54%
Can read daily materials but reads below a 6th-grade level, struggling with complex texts like editorial news articles or dense contracts.

It's those or similarish stats.

UK I think tend to be slightly better - 1% not reading at all and around 16% to 20% of adults in the UK are considered "functionally illiterate" or have very poor literacy skills, meaning they struggle with complex texts like bills or job applications rather than complete inability to read.

USA is behind on the phonics usage than in UK - well depends state of Mississippi a trail blazer with reading and does use phonics.

Exactly, so who is just letting these children guess without correcting them and telling them to try again?
DD1 in her 2010s primary school was encouraged to guess words with reading - and if guessed incorrectly encouraged to guess again. DS same school two years later they were using phonics - breaking words down into sounds.

Wales doesn't mandate phonics usuage - how kids are taught to read is left to schools and literary rates are lower than in England - lowest in whole UK I believe.

At my Mum's high school (Scotland, 1940s, just the local school) she took French, German and Latin. She could still remember a great deal of what she'd been taught well into her 90s.

I've no doubt that the teachers are doing the best they can but they have around 30 children with maybe some volunteers to listen to the kids read. Those who don't have parental support with reading are at such a disadvantage. Perhaps this is more so with a system where it's so easy to just pretend to be reading by guessing.

Truthfully, in the US the literacy rates have nothing to do with phonics or lot. The rates are strongly correlated with economic status and race. The legacy of discrimination is still being passed on to future generations. There are systemic failures in our education system.

Quality of education is wildly different from school to school. Early childhood educational opportunities are different depending on parental income.

I suppose you sort of need both, don't you? (Whole word and phonics). Because it's useful to know what sound a letter usually equates to, but then, in English at least, different letters often have different sounds in different words, so whole-world helps you to learn all the exceptions (in English, thousands of the buggers) to the "rules". More intelligent kids who've been taught the whole-word way will just reverse-engineer the phonics thing in their heads and not need to be taught it, but the less bright ones will probably need it. Though I still think it's best for everyone to start with whole-word - having a parent read you a story as they follow the words with their finger is more likely to prompt interest in the whole business and desire to get the hang of it (wow, these paper things are full of a whole world of stories and magic and I want to be able to unlock it myself!) than someone pointing at individual weird squiggles of ink on a page and making weird meaningless noises. Seems like the fask track to making reading seem dull at best and a torment at worst.

So it’s really interesting. Apparently they use a technique called 3 cueing..

Semantics (Meaning): Using context clues, background knowledge, or pictures to figure out what word makes sense.
Syntax (Structure): Using grammar and the placement of the word in a sentence to predict what part of speech or word fits.
Graphophonics (Visual): Looking at the print, initial letters, or word shapes, often treating letters as secondary hints rather than a full decoding tool.

So the teachers were literally going… look at the pictures, look at the first few letters, what do we think this word is? (Ie guess)… let’s read that back again and see if that makes sense.

This is why parents all went mad at Covid because for the first time they saw the insanity of the idea live on zoom.

Thats how you have teachers I posted above with loads of students literally just guessing words at secondary.

And to those saying it’s goady… I have no idea if this stat is true. But it’s making me question if it is… then do we have that here in England too?! If so it’s wild to think about. As others have said many learnt using whole word methods and why would we be immune to this when Americans speak the same language.

Sure we have fixed it now. All our kids do learn phonics. But what about adults who can’t read. I don’t know. It’s blown my mind and I still have so many questions.

Umm I learnt to sight read and have absolutely no problem working out new words. The more we read the more we learn the "rules" both written and unwritten and the idiosyncrasies of the English language.

I can also speed sight read, where yes we make educated guesses with what word is coming up, but they are educated guesses and if we do get it wrong we catch it and go back to re-read

They said this for years in USA then the Mississippi Miracle happened -
dramatic rise in fourth-grade reading scores and national rankings on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), where the state went from 49th place in 2013 to the top 10 (ranking 9th) nationally.

There are many problems with the US education system(s) and yes the poorest schools having least money isn't helpful.

However Mississippi did not gain in money during that period it remained the poorest state in the USA.

Mississips improved it's reading scores by having schools shifted aways from guessing strategies and embraced structured literacy and explicit phonics instruction. The state placed specialized reading coaches directly inside struggling elementary schools. Under the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, third-grade students who failed to meet basic reading benchmarks were held back to get intensive remediation rather than pushed ahead.

So I'd say phonics is part of the picture TBH - though as you say not the whole one.

I can see how that approach could work when looking at a children's book with pictures but not a chapter book or something more like an instruction manual. If I was employing someone that needed to read instructions or a workplace policy and that was how they were "reading" it then I'd be very concerned.

And to those saying it’s goady… I have no idea if this stat is true.

Let me Google that for you.

Adult Literacy in the United States

Four in five U.S. adults (79 percent) have English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences—literacy skills at level 2 or above in PIAAC (OECD 2013).

Do you have form for posting things on MN that you have no idea are true? It reflects poorly on you when you do.

So as I say I am dyslexic I so couldn't see the difference between say through and throrough or friend and fiend, but could make sense of it through context. It was fine until I started failing to learn latin. I could French because I had been to France and saw road signs and food packets also heard people speaking it.

As I've explained multiple times, that's still the wrong way to sound out a word.

Lol. The irony. Go listen to the podcast

Do you think it’s not possible for a podcast to share false information?

I think you’re missing the point. A podcast is just as reliable as PPs random google search.

Not I nor PP know whether this stat is true. What we do know… if you listened to the podcast and read around all the people talking about it. Is that there is a huge problem.

How is two people talking on a podcast as reliable as an actual cited source?