What's the Problem?
Learning to read in any language is hard, and in English very hard. Many children in the UK and USA never reach fluency in the early years, and go through school unable to benefit fully from their lessons. This leads to disengagement and low motivation to learn. Teachers in secondary school have to assume a level of reading ability that is often missing, so the lessons do not make sense to many students. They leave school with limited skills which limit their prospects in education, work, health, earnings, and lives.
The help many learners lack is an adult to help them through the early texts by reading the words they cannot, so they can learn and progress.
Why is learning to read English so hard?
Italian children learn to read Italian in about 3 months. The letters each have a consistent relationship to the sounds, so once you have learnt the letters, you can sound out the words correctly. English does not work like that, which is why it typically takes years to learn to read it.
Depending on your accent, you use about 40 different sounds to make the words you say. We use 26 letters to represent these sounds, so there is not a simple 1 to 1 relationship between letters and sounds, as there is in many languages. But it gets worse. When people started writing English in the middle ages, they used spellings that were based on the language the word came from (Latin, French, Saxon, Danish and Dutch) rather than representing the sound in a consistent way. The spelling of English has never been made systematic. The pronunciation of words also changes over time, so the meaning has stayed the same, but the sounds no longer match the writing.
There have been several approaches to teaching reading, and many children are taught using a mixture of methods, with elements of whole-word memorisation, of phonics, and of "rules" that only work some of the time. Both children and teachers are often confused by this.
The result is that learning to read English is hard, whichever way you are taught. Most letters represent two or more possible sounds, and each sound is spelled in different ways, depending on the word it is in. the letter "e" sounds different in "pet", "scene", "the", and "bone". The sound /ee/ (as in seen) is spelled ee in seen, ea in cream, e_e in serene, and 7 other ways. On average, each sound we make has 4 possible spellings.
We have 176 common ways of spelling the 40-44 sounds we use to speak, as well as some rare and unique spellings. So to read fluently, you have to learn the possible sounds represented by each written word, and use context to decide which sound makes sense in each instance.
How big is the problem?
In the UK,
“A quarter of primary school leavers are unable to read or write properly,” Jeremy Hunt, 16 June 2019. Many of these will survive secondary school by guessing what the text says when they can't read it, and will leave secondary school little better off than when they started it.
In the USA,
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a sector of the U.S. Department of Education, 85 percent of Black students in the 8th grade lack proficiency in reading skills. They are “functionally illiterate,” meaning that they are “unable to manage daily living and employment tasks.”
Poverty plays a large role in whether children develop literacy skills during their early years, and 22% of children in the U.S. live in poverty.
Ethnicity is also a factor. About 52% of Black and 45% of Hispanic fourth graders score below basic reading levels, compared to 23% of white students. Those who are behind in 4th grade typically stay behind for the rest of their schooling, learning less than their peers each year.
About 27% of eighth grade students are below basic reading level, per NCES. Another 39% are below the proficient reading level. Only 34% leave 8th grade as proficient readers. We have failed the other 66%.
Overseas
In the rest of the world, many children want to learn to read in their local language, and are held back by lack of teachers, books, literate adults and other resources to help them learn. Millions also want to learn to read in English (as a second language) because that is the key to many career opportunities. They have the double challenge of learning a new language, and learning to read such a confusingly written language.
What is the Impact of Poor Reading?
In childhood, reading provides a rich source of entertainment and learning. School work assumes that children can read instructions and explanations. If the child can't read well enough, the tasks become impossible, and they develop coping strategies to survive school by guessing, faking it, or tuning out rather than solving the problem (which they can't, without specialist help). Reading well opens the door to making sense of the lessons in secondary school, to further and higher education, and in adult life, it gives access to better jobs, better health, better decisions to purchase anything from foods to houses, and more informed choices in politics.
According to Regis College:
Many Americans lack the literacy skills to fill out a job application.
Low reading and math skills lead to higher rates of unemployment.
Illiteracy results in a lack of college education.
Globally, illiterate people earn about 35% less than literate employees.
The ability to obtain and understand health information, is closely related to an individual’s literacy level.
Two-thirds of students who lack proficient reading skills by the end of fourth grade end up in jail or on welfare.
Some 85% of youth who are involved in the juvenile court system are classified as functionally illiterate.
About 70% of inmates in U.S. prisons can’t read above a fourth-grade level.
Low levels of literacy cost the U.S. an estimated $225 billion in workforce productivity losses, crime, and unemployment-related loss of tax revenue.
Illiteracy results in welfare expenses. Most recipients are high school dropouts, and most food stamp recipients have poor literacy.