Reflecting on Literacy in Education

Peter Hannon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135708979
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Literacy has become central to debates on policy and practice in education in the UK and other English-speaking countries. This book introduces teachers to current thought on the place of literacy in education, providing many different perspectives. It charts the latest ideas, and relates practical and policy concerns to an understanding of theoretical issues.
Concise and accessible, it connects with key aspects of the experience of professionals and students alike, and provides issues for group discussion or individual study, as well as suggestions for further reading.

Chapter 1

Literacy Is Fundamental

Overviews

Much is heard these days of a literacy crisis. Although talk of crisis may be exaggerated for political purposes it is still worth trying to identify the nature of current literacy problems. They relate to ever increasing literacy demands in society and to the uneven distribution of literacy competence in the population. Literacy has been, and continues to be, fundamental to political aspirations and to contemporary human culture. It is therefore fundamental to education. Current literacy policy development in England can be reviewed in this context.

A Literacy Crisis?

Why do we hear so much about literacy in education these days? Ten or twenty years ago the term had very limited currency and was used mainly in relation to adult illiteracy. Now it figures daily in both professional and popular discourse about schools and education. In 1998 the government in England declared a Year of Reading and launched a National Literacy Strategy.

Underlying the discourse is anxiety – not only in the UK but in other countries around the world. It is perhaps understandable in those countries where many adults are classed as illiterate and primary education is not yet universal. Economic progress, improvements in health and perhaps political development could be seen in such countries as requiring improved literacy and, even though United Nations statistics indicate that more people in the world, and a higher than ever proportion of the world's population, are literate, anxiety about the rate of improvement is understandable. But how can the anxiety be explained in long-industrialised countries where there has been universal primary education for several generations? In these ‘developed’ countries there is concern about a minority of illiterate adults and there are complaints about the inadequacy of workforce literacy skills needed for competition in international markets. This is often accompanied by controversy about how schools should teach literacy.

In 1997 a government White Paper in England asserted that ‘our performance in literacy is behind a number of comparable English-speaking countries’ and ‘standards of literacy have not changed significantly between the end of the war and the early 1990s’ (Department for Education and Employment (DfEE), 1997, p. 19). In the United States, Steven Pinker, a prominent researcher in language and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, asserted: ‘We are turning into a nation of illiterates, the victims of misguided ideas about the nature of reading and how to teach it’ (Pinker, 1998, pp. ix–x). Can things be so bad? If there is a crisis, what exactly is its nature? What are the likely causes, what are the likely remedies, and how well do proposed remedies relate to causes?

We should be cautious about accepting crisis talk at face value. If politicians are to the fore in drawing attention to a ‘crisis’, defining its nature and proposing remedies, a certain amount of scepticism is advisable. One has to be alert, for example, to the possibility that it may be in the interests of some groups in society if the ‘literacy crisis’ diverts attention from other problems of social order, economic decline, unemployment or educational provision (or if it can be presented as the root cause of such problems). Another possibility is that the vocabulary of literacy is being appropriated for ideological purposes in order to disguise or justify processes of exclusion in society. If certain social groups are oppressed and if they are also largely illiterate (according to some concept of ‘literacy’) it may be convenient to explain their position as being the result of illiteracy. This is a more comforting explanation for social ills than accounts in terms, say, of racism, market forces or the needs of the rich. In so far as illiteracy serves as a justification for injustice, it may even be in the interests of ruling groups in society to perpetuate illiteracy in certain groups. This can be done by lower resourcing of literacy teaching (e.g. reduced funding for books, unfavourable teacher–pupil ratios). There can be overly rigid definitions of what is to count as literacy and biased or narrow forms of assessment. As Denny Taylor (1997) has argued,

Race, gender and socioeconomic status are all factors that critically affect whose ‘literacy’ counts. There seems to be a limit to how much success there is to go around, and not all types of knowledge or ways of knowing are recognized. (Taylor, 1997, p. 2)

In some discourse, the term ‘illiterate’ can serve as a substitute for ‘unemployed’, ‘poor’, ‘black’ or ‘working class’. The definition of illiteracy can be narrowed or widened as convenient. For example, in the United States, illiteracy is sometimes equated with ‘high school drop out’ thereby implying that a very large group of people face the difficulties which ought perhaps to be ascribed to only a few. To reinforce the point, there can be attempts to ameliorate the circumstances of such groups by attempts to raise literacy levels which do not improve matters much because they do not address the real problem. Freire (1972) provided a blunt commentary on this.

Merely teaching men to read and write does not work miracles; if there are not enough jobs for men able to work, teaching more men to read and write will not create them. (Freire, 1972, p. 25)

The United Nations was led to proclaim 1990 as ‘International Literacy Year’ on the grounds that illiteracy was linked to poverty, underdevelopment, child health and economic, social and cultural exclusion (UNESCO, 1988). These views invite the metaphor of illiteracy as disease – something to be eradicated. The author of a recent UK report on basic skills (Working Group on Post-School Basic Skills, 1999) has referred in a radio interview to adults with limited literacy skills as having a ‘mental disability’ (Moser, 1999). Yet the fullest possible literacy will not be sufficient to bring about the changes sought unless there are also changes in other determining factors. Graff (1979) has shown that there is little historical justification for supposing that in the past increased literacy led to (rather than was merely associated with) economic progress. In the future, literacy may, at best, be a necessary condition for certain kinds of development; it cannot possibly be a sufficient condition.

In the United States, there has emerged a ‘family literacy’ rhetoric (Hannon, 1999) in which poverty and unemployment are represented as problems caused by a ‘cycle’ of low literacy levels in certain communities. Elsa Auerbach has commented,

Suggesting that enhanced family literacy interactions will break the cycle of poverty or compensate for problems facing the educational system only reinforces the ideology that blames poor people for their own problems and leaves social inequities intact. (Auerbach, 1995, p. 23)

Nevertheless, the possibility – likelihood, even – that there is an element of political cynicism in claims about a literacy crisis does not mean that there is no problem. The challenge is to clarify the nature and extent of the problem.

The Nature of the Literacy Problem

I wish to argue that there is a literacy problem in Britain and comparable countries and that it has two interrelated aspects. First, the literacy levels of some young people are probably inadequate for the social and economic demands now facing them. Second, there are huge variations in literacy levels within society which, even if they do not wholly explain social inequalities, are a serious impediment to reducing inequality.

The literacy levels of school leavers has been a recurrent issue of controversy. Almost a generation ago, in 1972, in England, it led the government to set up the Bullock Committee to enquire into standards and methods of teaching. The committee received evidence from many people who believed standards of literacy had fallen but it pointed out that similar complaints could be found fifty years previously in the Newbolt Report of 1921 where one employer had stated that ‘teaching of English in present day schools produces a very limited command of the English language’ (Department of Education and Science (DES), 1975, p. 3). The Bullock Report, although widely acclaimed by professionals in education and highly influential, did not allay anxieties for long. By the end of the 1980s the controversy had surfaced again and further reports were required (DES, 1990; Cato and Whetton, 1991). Parallel developments occurred in other industrialised countries.

Determining the literacy level of children in school, and judging whether it is rising or falling, is not an easy matter but studies which have been carried out suggest there is no evidence in Britain that the level has fallen since the 1940s (Brooks et al., 1996; Hurry, 1999). Neither does it appear to have risen, however, and that may be cause for concern given that the literacy demands of work and society have probably increased in that period. Certainly there are far fewer jobs available now for school leavers with low literacy competence. Even if the day-to-day requirements of some jobs are not very demanding, they do not stay the same for long and the process of retraining often makes literacy demands. In literacy, as in many other areas of life, it is doubtful whether the standards of the late 1940s can be considered adequate for the new century.

Many governments claim that retaining their economic position in the global economy means having a skilled, well-educated (and therefore highly literate) workforce. Workers unable to meet these demands will be unemployed and therefore socially excluded. It is the literacy level of this group which could be said to constitute a problem. In 1988 the European Commission argued that the ‘persistence of illiteracy in industrialised countries’ of the Community was ‘a worrying social problem concerning a large number of the working population’ (Commission of the European Communities, 1988). Against the background of attempts by the Community to establish itself as a competitive industrial and trading bloc, the Commission expressed concern about the ‘social cost of illiteracy in our societies, in terms of manpower which can only be retrained with difficulty, in terms of unused potential’. An action research programme in ‘the prevention and combating of illiteracy’ was launched.

Yet the links between economic development and levels of literacy are far from clear as Peter Robinson (1997) has pointed out.

according to World Bank data, the two most successful small Asian economies, Singapore and Hong Kong, had in 1985 adult illiteracy rates of 14 and 12 per cent respectively, rising to 20 per cent for women. So their impressive economic progress does not appear to have been hampered by levels of adult illiteracy significantly higher than in the advanced industrial economies where functional illiteracy rates are typically less than 1 per cent. (Robinson, 1997, p. 19)

Robinson also points out that the annual Skills Needs Survey by the Department for Education and Employment shows only 4 per cent of employers reporting that their business objectives were being hampered by a lack of literacy and numeracy among their employees. Employers were much more concerned about motivation and lack of skills in management, information and general communication.

Nevertheless, adults with literacy difficulties do constitute a small but significant minority in Britain and comparable societies. Exact numbers are difficult to determine since there are methodological problems in defining illiteracy and in surveying and assessing adults’ competence. Research in the United States has sought to determine levels of literacy in terms of performance criteria. The National Adult Literacy Survey sampled around 13,600 adults and distinguished five levels of literacy (Kirsch et al., 1993). It found that almost a quarter had skills in the lowest level of proficiencies and were unable to perform ‘quite limited’ reading and writing tasks. The study also showed a huge variation in literacy skills related to quality of life and employment opportunities.

Testing adults may not be the best way to determine literacy levels since literacy ability is a relative concept and what matters is the individual's ability to cope with the demands they experience in society. The alternative is to use adults’ self-reports of literacy difficulties (although that is open to criticism on the grounds that it relies on individuals’ own judgements about their abilities and various factors such as their job, their aspirations or their understanding of the interview questions could lead to either an over-estimate or an under-estimate of ‘true’ literacy levels).

The approach of simply asking adults whether they have had difficulties with reading or writing since leaving school was taken in Britain in the fourth National Child Development Study follow-up study when a national sample of over 12,500 23-year-olds was interviewed (Adult Literacy and Basic Skills Unit (ALBSU), 1987). Around 10 per cent of the adults reported difficulties with reading, writing or spelling. Of these, about half had difficulties just with writing (including spelling) but not with reading; the others had difficulties with both. Fewer than one in ten of those with difficulties had attended any kind of adult literacy course. Although some had had literacy difficulties at school and were in manual jobs, it is interesting that a significant number had not received any special help in school and were in non-manual jobs. In other words, the ‘illiterate’ on this definition did not conform to any easily identified stereotype. Although about a quarter reported that their literacy difficulties were in some way work-related, for most they were encountered in a wide range of contexts.

These findings were replicated in a later British study of a nationally representative sample of 1,650 21-year-olds (Ekinsmyth and Bynner, 1994). The pattern of self-reported difficulties appears to be the same as in the 1987 study but this study also assessed the young people's performance on a set of tasks. It found that 5 per cent could not find a restaurant address from the Yellow Pages, 24 per cent could not locate basic information in a video recorder manual, and 48 per cent could not read advice about how to help someone suffering from hypothermia. Literacy scores based on such tasks were strongly related to family background, school attainment and employment history. The authors concluded,

A picture emerges of the person lacking basic skills as being marginalised first in education and then in the peripheral unskilled regions of the labour market, typically with long spells of unemployment. (Ekinsmyth and Bynner, 1994, p. 55)

In 1999 a working group chaired by Claus Moser claimed that 7 million adults in England, one in five of the adult population, was functionally illiterate (Working Group on Post-School Basic Skills, 1999, p. 8). The evidence quoted was that this proportion of adults, given the alphabetical index to the Yellow Pages, could not locate the page reference for plumbers. The working group proposed a National Strategy with increased opportunities for adult learners, a basic skill curriculum, a new sytem of qualifications, teacher training, inspection of courses, more use of information technology, and greatly increased funding for this area of education.

The Moser recommendations are premised on a very high – perhaps an implausibly high – estimate of the prevalence of illiteracy in England. However, even if one accepts the figure of 7 million adults, it could still be argued that if there is a problem concerning literacy levels it is not one of generally low levels (however defined) in the population as a whole so much as a problem of a significant group within the population. There might be arguments about whether it is 5, 10, 15 or 20 per cent of the population but there is a high degree of consensus that the problem of standards is not general but specific to a minority. This is borne out by a study by Brooks et al. (1996) which found that, in comparison with other countries, there was a long ‘tail’ of low scoring 9-year-olds in England and Wales on a reading test used in an international study.

What is known about the group of low attainers? Brooks et al. (1996) found that boys were more likely than girls to have low reading scores (a difference of four points on a standardised scores) but an even stronger association was found with low family income (a nine-point difference, where low family income was defined in terms of entitlement to free school meals). This accords with evidence going back many years from National Child Development Study surveys of children aged 7, 11 and 14 which have shown wide and growing differences between children from different social backgrounds (Davie et al., 1972; Fogelman and Goldstein, 1976; Wedge and Prosser, 1973). At age 11 children from the most disadvantaged 6 per cent of households were an average of three-and-a-half years behind others in reading test scores (Wedge and Prosser, 1973).

In summary, there would appear to be a literacy problem in terms of standards in schools which have not risen as one might have expected over the last half century but, importantly, that this problem relates to a sub-group of the population.

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Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Reflecting on Literacy in Education
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor's Preface
• Preface
• 1 Literacy Is Fundamental
• 2 History and Future of Literacy
• 3 One Literacy or Many?
• 4 Theories of Literacy Development
• 5 Reflecting on Teaching Methods
• 6 Researching Literacy in Education
• 7 Literacy in Professional Development
• 8 Reflecting on the Context for Reflection
• References
• Index of Author Names
• Subject Index