Functional,Illiteracy,Its,Shoc education Functional Illiteracy: Its Shocking Extent and Seriousness,

Translation jobs are undertaken by professional translators who are well versed with at least two languages.Translation can work at two levels: inter-state or regional language translation and inter-national or foreign language translation. Some forms of parent involvement with the school such as communications with school, volunteering, attending school events and parent--parent connections appeared to have little effect on student achievement, especially in high school. Helpi

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;mso-style-noshow:yes;mso-style-priority:99;mso-style-qformat:yes;mso-style-parent:"";mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;mso-para-margin-top:0in;mso-para-margin-right:0in;mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt;mso-para-margin-left:0in;line-height:115%;mso-pagination:widow-orphan;font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}A recent, careful study of the most thorough andstatistically accurate report on U.S. adult literacy ever commissioned by theU.S. government (a free 200 page report available at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93275) provesthat the extent and seriousness of English illiteracy is a much worsethan previously believed. The good news is that the solution toEnglish illiteracy is much easier than almost anyone would ever dare todream.  Do We Really Have a Literacy Crisis? As a result of being able to read, we are—to a large extent—separatedfrom those who are very poor readers. As a result of the coping methodsilliterates have developed, many of our associates may be illiteratewithout our knowledge. We therefore may find it hard to believe that we have aliteracy crisis, but a recent study of the most thorough and statisticallyaccurate study of U.S. adult illiteracy ever commissioned by the U.S.government conclusively proves we do have a crisis. This study was afive-year, $14 million study involving lengthy interviews of 26,049 U.S. adultsstatistically balanced for age, gender, ethnicity, and location (urban,suburban, and rural from twelve states across the U.S. and 1,100 inmates from80 prisons) to represent the entire U.S. population. This report, titled AdultLiteracy in America, divided theinterviewees into five literacy groups according to their ability to respondproperly to material they were given to read. The number of days worked peryear and the amount they earned per hour was reported by literacy grouping. Using data from the Adult Literacyin America report, Literacy Research Associates, Inc., a non-profiteducational corporation, calculated the average yearly earnings by literacygroup and compared with the threshold poverty level for an individual reportedby the U.S. Census Bureau. The average annual earnings of U.S. adults in thetwo lowest literacy groups, comprising 48.7% of the interviewees were below thepoverty threshold. This means that 48.7% of U.S. adults read and write sopoorly that they cannot hold an above-poverty-level-wage job. This is anotherway of saying they are functionally illiterate. We do not see this levelof poverty because most families have more than one employed adult and becausemost low-income families receive assistance from government agencies, family,friends, and charities. Literacy Research Associates also calculated thecombined average yearly earnings of the two least literate groups and comparedwith the combined average yearly earnings of the three most literate groups. Thesedata prove that 31.2% of U.S. adults who are functionally illiterate are inpoverty and that they are more than twice as likely to be in poverty because oftheir illiteracy as for all other reasons combined. A total of .312 times 48.7or 15.2% of all U.S. adults are in poverty, a figure in close agreementwith poverty estimates from other sources. Another reason we do not see this level of poverty is because theway that media presents information often hides the true dimensions of theproblem. Most people have not read the above-mentioned report; their onlyknowledge of it comes from newspaper accounts of the study. The only knownnewspaper reports about the study, a New York Times article and a Washington Post article, appeared in somenewspapers the day after the AdultLiteracy in America report was released. Both of these articles badlyobscured the true extent of the problem. A 28 page follow-up report by the same agencies who conducted the1993 study was issued in 2006 (available free at http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF). Itused a smaller, 19,417 interviewee, database. There were no overallstatistically significant differences in the annual earnings of theinterviewees, by literacy level, between the 2006 and the 1993 reports.Although there are several ways of determining functional illiteracy,the employment of workers in for-profit businesses is undoubtedly themost accurate. Businesses will not keep someone on the payroll who reads sopoorly that they cannot be a profitable employee. Poverty, of course, is not the only problem that must beconstantly endured by functional illiterates. Jonathan Kozol's 1985 book, IlliterateAmerica, told of about 34 different types of serious physical, mental,emotional, medical, and financial problems that illiterates must constantlyendure—problems that most of us would consider a crisis if we had toendure them.  The Simple, Logical Solution An understanding of those problems was the main impetusbehind several years of research performed by Literacy Research Associates, Inc.This research resulted in the modification and perfection of a proven solutionto the problem of English illiteracy that has been recommended by dozensof educational and linguistic scholars for over 250 years. It is asolution that has been implemented by several nations smaller and larger thanthe U.S. and by both advanced and developing nations. Several distinguishedscholars have thoroughly debunked all reasonable objections to thissolution. Most of us who can read, learned to read as children and have longsince forgotten the difficulty we had in learning to read. Our eyes skipeasily over a multitude of traps for beginning readers. Professor Julius Nyikosof Washington and Jefferson College made a study of six desk-sized dictionariesand found 1768 ways of spelling 40 phonemes in English. (A phoneme is thesmallest sound in a language or dialect which is used to distinguish betweensyllables or words.) A computer was programmed with all of the rules of Englishspelling and was able to correctly spell only about half of a large list ofcommon words. This is because every spelling rule has exceptions, and some of theexceptions have exceptions! Our chaotic, illogical, and inconsistent spelling came aboutbecause in 1755 Dr. Samuel Johnson issued his well-received dictionary in whichhe, in effect, froze the spelling of words instead the spelling ofthe phonemes as linguisticlogic demands. His dictionary froze the spelling, in most cases, as the wordwas spelled in the language of origin. There were eight different nationallanguage groups who had occupied the British isles by 1755, and we adoptedwords from each of them. Since 1755, according to Henry Hitchings, in his book,The Secret Life of Words, we have adopted words—and usually theirspelling—from 350 languages. Most English words, therefore, are not spelledwith letters representing sounds but are represented by logograms like Chinesecharacters. Specific letters in a specific order represent the entire word inthe same way that specific strokes in a specific arrangement represent Chinesecharacters. Although English spelling is less complicated than Chinesecharacters, it is more confusing. Specific strokes in a specific arrangement inChinese always represent the same word or part of a word. In English asingle phoneme can be spelled 60 or more ways and a singleletter can represent as many as ten phonemes! As a result, every word in aperson's reading vocabulary must be learned one-at-a-time by rote memory or byrepeated use. The "proven solution" mentioned above is due to the factthat Dr. Frank Laubach, founder of Laubach LiteracyInternational, went around the world teaching illiterate adults to read inover 300 alphabetic languages. He found that in 90 percent of these languageshe could teach them to read in from one to 20 days. In some of the simplerlanguages—as in one or more dialects of the Philippine language—he could teachadults to read in one hour! In 98 percent of the languages, hecould teach them to read in less than three months. The grammar and syntax ofEnglish is neither the easiest nor the most difficult, but the spelling is byfar the worst of any alphabetic language. The grammar and syntax of English iseasier, for example, than several European languages, in every one of whichstudents can learn to read fluently in less than three months. Most studentsrequire two years or more to learn to read English. Dr. Laubach believes the U.S. wastes two-and-one-half years inteaching American schoolchildren to read. He states on page 48 of his book, FortyYears With the Silent Billion, "If we spelled English phonetically,American children could be taught to read in a week." Rudolph Flesch, inhis book, Why Johnny Still Can't Read, states that Russianschoolchildren are taught to read 46 of the 130 national languages of Russia infirst grade and that there is no reading instruction, as such, after firstgrade! Although learning to read English fluently in a week may be somewhatoptimistic for some students, every student of normal intelligence cancertainly be expected to learn to read fluently in less than three months—perhapsmuch less for some students. Despite activity following the 1983 "A Nation At Risk"report about education, nothing done in the last eighty years has made astatistically significant improvement. All changes made to improve the teachingof reading to date really amount to merely tweaking the existing system tocombat the symptoms of the problem rather than making changes to solvethe problem. It islike taking aspirin to cure the symptoms of pneumonia instead ofantibiotics to cure it. This is similar to, for example, acquiring new readingbooks to overcome the disadvantages of English spelling instead of solving theproblem by making the spelling phonetic. Furthermore, whatever changeswe make to the teaching method for present English reading material, thestudents will still have to contend with the chaotic, illogical, inconsistentspelling and will require well over a year to learn to read traditionallyspelled English—one word at a time. After Gary Sprunk, M.A. English Linguistics, read Let's End OurLiteracy Crisis by Bob Cleckler, he formed NuEnglish, Inc. topromote the recommended spelling system. NuEnglish, Inc. is a non-profiteducational corporation and a 509(a)(2) private charity. Cleckler is CEO ofLiteracy Research Assoc., Inc. His book describes NuEnglish, a simple,logical spelling system such as Dr. Frank Laubach recommended.  It isquite obviously much easier to learn the spelling of the 38 phonemes used inNuEnglish and the way of blending them into words than to learn all 20,000 ormore words in a person’s reading vocabulary. Some readers have a readingvocabulary of 70,000 or more words. Gary Sprunk also added rules for NuEnglish spelling (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuEnglish) toimprove consistency of the spelling and to enable programming of his Respellerprogram, which now has a database of over 498,000 English words. Respeller willconvert up to about 25 pages of English material into NuEnglish spelling inonly a couple of minutes. Respeller will flag any words not in thedatabase. Users of Respeller can choose either the General American or theBritish dialects pronunciations. The Revised Version of Cleckler’s book, available from http://www.amazon.com/dp/1589824970,waspublished in May 2009 by American University & Colleges Press.