I wanted to start this blog by stating two things.
One, my own bias, I love reading. It is one of my favorite things to do, I have been an avid reader my entire life and I am one of those people who read fiction and non-fiction alike. I read so much that I had to buy MULTIPLE bookshelves to hold my books, and a kindle on top of that for harder to find novels that are only found in eBook format. Yeah.
Two, I am going to try to not make this blog depressing, but as I started to research this topic for our podcast I was taken aback by the statistics and the stories that I read. Since reading has been such an intricate part of my life, I cannot imagine living without it.
So, with that out of the way, let’s talk about adult literacy and how it affects us as learning professionals, and just as human beings.
I stumbled on this topic by reading an article about college students at a prestigious university not being able to read the assignments. While this may seem like nothing new, to this professor it seemed not like a lack of motivation, but a lack of skill to read an entire book. That is what caught my attention – college students at Ivy League schools that could not finish a book. To make a long article short, it turns out that most high school students are not required to read an entire book start to finish.
If you are like me, you are thinking – well there were always things like CliffsNotes for those who did not want to read, but that is not the situation. Some of these students were NEVER ASSIGNED the task of reading the entire book cover to cover. They were tasked with reading excerpts from the book then analyzing just that excerpt. So now they go to college, and they can’t read more than a few paragraphs at a time.
But what does this mean for us as L&D professionals? Well, as anyone that has done a proper audience analysis will tell you, education levels are typically all over the place in your audiences so we have to assume that we will have some learners that have never had to read any form of long form prose and analyze its contents.
Oh, but wait, there is more.
Upon researching adult literacy, one statement kept leaping out at me. It said that 54% of Americans from ages 16-54 read below a 6th grade reading level. Stop a minute and read that statement again, because I fact checked that on Snopes.com and it is true. 54% of people between ages 16-54 read below a 6th grade reading level. That is elementary school reading level, typically rated for ages 11-12.
So, not only can most of our learners not read anything that is longer than a few paragraphs, but they also cannot comprehend anything above an elementary school level. This is where I started to feel defeated.
So how do we combat this? The most obvious way is to tailor our materials to our audience. This is our job. We ensure that our learners can understand our materials. We conduct a proper audience analysis and make sure that our materials are not too high of a reading level. Using vocabulary that is understandable to our learners is key.
We can also lean into a wider range of modalities. Microlearning, videos, podcasts; most multimedia can ease the reliance on reading and vocabulary for our learners and is rapidly becoming how most people consume media anyway.
But in the end the problem persists. The learners still cannot read. This is where my bias starts to show. I want to teach them to read at higher levels. I want to show them how reading can make your life easier, how it can open your mind to the world around you and enlighten you not only to what is happening in the world, but the patterns and fluctuations in the history of the world that got us to where we are now.
Media literacy, which is one of the most important topics in today’s society, is inextricably tied to reading literacy. How can you understand the world around you if you have to take someone else’s opinion on the news reports? If you can never read what is happening for yourself, you will always hear it through someone else’s bias.
This is the answer I still do not have. I have made a small contribution by passing on my love of reading to my daughter. We just had to buy a bookshelf for her bedroom to hold all the books she got for Christmas. And I have seen articles on the resurgence of Barnes & Noble thanks to BookTok, so hopefully things are starting to shift. This is the hope that I want to end this blog on. There are things that I see that show reading is having a small resurgence, and hopefully it will turn the tide.
