Adult Literacy

Adult Literacy Statistics

Literacy & Social Pathology

David Boulton: This plays right into the National Institute for Literacy’s upcoming report on the state of adult literacy and the strong correlations between the patterns that we see at the NAEP level and how they seem to play out in adult society. That high percentages of inmates in prison are people of color and people that can’t read, and similarly in welfare and health care. There’s such a strong correlation between literacy and all these other social pathologies.

Dr. Timothy Shanahan:  How aware you are of what’s going on in your society is correlated with it. How often you vote, whether you’re registered to vote – that’s connected to literacy. Whether you’re working, what level job you’re working in, your likelihood of getting employed – all those are connected. Not all low literacy people commit crime, but it does appear that the largest percentage of people who commit crime are of low literacy. Every social pathology appears to be related to literacy attainment. Every good that we distribute in our society seems to be related to it. Literacy is a great enabler.

Let’s be honest – a child who comes out of an impoverished background in terms of what his mother or father can provide materially – if that kid does well in learning literacy he is much more likely to live at a higher standard than his parents, he is much more likely to be able to participate in any number of social activities that his or her parents can’t participate in. But the deck is stacked against that kind of a child, and the statistics suggest that he or she will probably end up more like their parents in literacy attainment (and the outcomes that can buy).

Real Cost is Lost Self-Esteem

Corroboration From Different Sectors of Society

Literacy and Civic Participation

2000 Florida Election & Reading Difficulty

Dr. Timothy Shanahan: One aspect of this that I had personal experience with was one of the newspapers asked me to analyze the votes in the 2000 Florida election. Obviously, media attention was directed to the hanging chads and the failure of the machines to record people’s votes. The thing that is interesting is that in Florida there are probably more counties that are using paper ballots than machine ballots. One of the newspapers said let’s look at the paper ballots and see how we did there. Florida lost even more votes with paper ballots than machine ballots, and they lost these votes primarily because people couldn’t make sense of the directions. 

Florida lost lots of votes because many citizens couldn’t do the simple reading tasks on the ballot. They would spoil their vote by voting multiple times for different candidates. Even this basic franchise of whether you get to cast a vote is connected to literacy. You’re less likely to go and try to vote, but if you do try, you’re more likely to fail and your vote will be lost. We’re almost fifty years beyond the Supreme Court saying there wouldn’t be any kind of a literacy bar to vote in this country.

David Boulton: Of course there’s going to be. Even if you get around the instrumental simple part of it, you’ve got the deeper issue of whether somebody is a competent participant.

The Role of Adults in Assisting Children who are Learning to Read

Adult Literacy

Children's Futures all but Fated by Reading

David Boulton: What we’re getting as we start to explore the facets of this is that it seems as if our children’s futures are all but fated, not fated, but all but fated by how well they learn to read.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes, that’s true. Particularly if we go back to the bookend analogy. Those children who are the caboose on the train, at the bookend on the left side of the books, are children who are at substantial academic risk.

Children who are failing at reading at the end of the first grade are extremely likely to be failing at reading at the end of fourth grade. And failure in reading strongly predicts failure in all other academic subjects. So, a child who is not breaking the code well, who has not figured it out, who is falling behind, is a child whose academic life course is at risk and because of that whose life is at risk because the economic opportunities of life.

Again, at the lower end of the dimension are ones that have profound effects on not only obvious things: quality of life dimensions, how much money one earns, or the neighborhood one lives in, but actually have effects on longevity, on how long you will live.

So, reading again, is absolutely fundamental. It’s almost trite to say that. But in our society, as it is structured, the inability to be fluent is to consign children to failure in school and to consign adults to the lowest strata of job and life opportunities.

Shame Inhibits Getting Help

Low Literacy, Isolation & Shame

Dr. Timothy Shanahan: It is a kind of shame and they do hideout. Again, you see that participation in professional organizations and honorary societies are more linked to high literacy than low literacy. Well, that’s not surprising to anybody. But then you start to look and you see that adults who are low literacy are less likely to participate in athletic organizations. They’re less likely to participate in religious organizations. They don’t take part in as many of the social activities. They essentially get isolated. 

You talked about it being an intellectual aversion, I think that’s part of it, but I think it’s even bigger than that. I think there’s a kind of a pulling back, there’s an embarrassment.

David Boulton: A shame aversion to everything that can stir up the kind of shame they want to avoid.

Dr. Timothy Shanahan: You got it. It plays out in terms of I’m not going to participate in an intellectual discussion or debate, or whatever, but I’m also not going to participate in a lot of other social activities as well. So, they really are losing out on big chunks of their lives.

What it means is that we’ve put through the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s and we’ve done so many things to try to facilitate full participation, but literacy still is there as a barrier holding people out, even though politically the barriers have been taken down.

David Boulton: In a recent report from ProLiteracy, according to their surveys and also by American Medical Association research, they find that most of the people that can’t read go to inordinate lengths to hide it. Something like sixty percent haven’t told their spouses. One projection was that when low literate Americans walk into a grocery store or department store they are stirred with anxiety trying to make sure that they can get past the cash register without making a mistake that they can’t afford but that they can’t know they’ve made because they don’t have the skills.

Dr. Timothy Shanahan: This hiding of the problem is real common. I don’t have a lot of statistics on it, but I have many personal experiences. For example, the mother who had come into one of our literacy programs – her kids were eight or nine and she was taking literacy classes because she didn’t want to hide it anymore. Her children, even at their age, didn’t know she didn’t have literacy. It was really surprising that she could hide that from them living in that household for so long. She said she always had to be on guard.

For example, she told us that, ‘When the kids come home from school I always make sure I’m busy – I’m washing, I’m ironing, I’m doing something so that if they come in and say here’s a letter from my teacher it allows me to say set it down I’ll get to it later, I don’t have time for that right now.’ She would depend upon her husband to do her reading.

In North Carolina we held a seminar on literacy for some teachers and we brought in a local business man who was low in literacy and he was willing to come in and talk to the teachers. The thing that was important was only two people in his life knew about his literacy problem: his wife and his business partner. Nobody else knew because he feared that if any of potential clients knew of the problem, he wouldn’t get contracts. He wanted this kept absolutely secret. We literally had to smuggle him onto the campus where we were working and put him in a room where we pulled the shades and had a guard at the door. (see Shame Stories)

These fears, sometimes it’s just a personal thing, that I don’t want my children to think less of me, and in other cases it really has larger meaning in terms of I don’t want to be discriminated against.

Low Literacy Civic Participation & Health

Dr. Timothy Shanahan: One interesting analysis done with adults who are low in literacy is that low literacy individuals are less likely to read a newspaper than a high literate person. But, of course, these folks could still participate by getting information from television and have radio. There’s absolutely no reason why a low literacy person wouldn’t be able to access a lot of the information that is available over those media.

Except it turns out that lack of literacy has an isolating effect. What happens is low literacy people are less likely to watch informational shows on television, they’re less likely to watch news, for example, than other kinds of television.

David Boulton: How can they navigate?

Dr. Timothy Shanahan: Exactly. They just don’t pay attention to stuff like that which means, they miss out on information about the candidates and elections and so on, but they also miss out on the large amount of health information that is on television news and so on. They don’t find out about the free pap smears down at the clinic. They don’t find out about the new statistics on smoking. They don’t find out about how to take care of their children better. And so their kids are at greater risk in all kinds of ways and they themselves are at greater risk.

Shame Avoidance & Dependence

David Boulton: Sometimes it’s so powerful and fast and operating before those kind of rational reasons to just be an avoidance. One of the dimensions that we’re trying to bring to this is our work with emotional scientists and cognitive scientists and neuroscientists and bringing together just what is going on here. There’s no question human beings generally do not like to feel shame. We learn very young to become escape artists.

Dr. Timothy Shanahan: Absolutely.

David Boulton: We’re being put into circumstances, with this learning to read challenge, in which day after day, week after week, month after month, in some cases year after year, we’re forced to do something we’re not good at. It’s not like basketball or sewing or music or other things that are an option –you can’t avoid it. Andthese kids are developing a shame aversion to the feel of their own learning.

Dr. Timothy Shanahan: Absolutely. And when they become adults it ends up becoming a part of the social reality of their lives. It’s not just harder to learn then, but emotionally that whole network that builds up around you makes it tougher. So, if you’re that low on literacy what usually happens is you have to find somebody you can depend on. I might not want the whole world to know, but maybe my spouse knows that I am illiterate or maybe it’s one of my older kids, but nobody else does. What that does is it builds a dependency. If I were especially low on literacy and my wife knew it she would do certain things for me to take care of me and make sure that I’m okay. But what happens to the relationship when I decide this is terrible, I have to go learn literacy, I’m going to go enroll at the local library program or whatever. How much does that threaten the partner who has come to depend on my dependence?

Quite often when an adult who is really low on literacy goes off and becomes literate it leads to divorce. There are many cases documented where women are beaten or abused in various ways, either verbally or physically, certainly emotionally, because the partner who is depended on doesn’t want to give that up. The reason you’re going for literacy classes is because you want to get away from me.

Even when it’s a child who is the one who is being depended upon, the children get quite angry. It’s like mom wants to leave me or mom doesn’t love me anymore and that’s why she’s doing this. The trick is to catch this thing early enough so we don’t get to that point where there are those kinds of problems in people’s lives. That is essential.

International Scope

One thing we haven’t touched on and it’s a problem, if you’re talking about reading in the United States of America it’s not important to touch on, but if you’re talking about reading in the rest of the world it is. And that’s the question of access to instruction for reading and motivation to obtain access. There’s a billion people in the world living below any reasonable definition of the poverty level, large numbers of children are not learning to read simply because they don’t have the opportunity to be exposed to even poor reading instruction. Even when those opportunities exist there are many oral societies in which it is not at all clear to the adults in that society what is to be gained from reading. So, as we’re thinking in a world context, instead of the context of industrialized advanced nations, we also need to pay attention to access and motivation for literacy both in terms for children as well as adults.

Defining Learning

I think when you talk to people in the field of learning disabilities and ask about learning, you quickly start zeroing in on processing. How does information processing impact learning as a very, very key component of the learning process? For kids and adults with learning disabilities that’s where the chief problem is – how the brain either does or does not process information. How the brain sometimes very inefficiently retrieves information, stores information, processes it and expresses it. So, any theory of learning for us is very practical. How do people make sense, especially sense of language, and of other kinds of information that the brain has to work with?

Slow Readers Need More Time

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: I don’t know if you want to get into it or not, because it’s probably a little different than what your primary focus is on, but a very important thing is children grow up to be adolescents and young adults, and they need to — whatever they want to aspire to be, a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, a writer, they often have to take a series of tests. One of the things we know is that because children who struggle to read don’t develop that left word forming area that’s responsible for being able to read more fluently, they read very slowly and require extra time.

That becomes a really important thing, because so many children who’ve worked so hard all their lives, they come to the point where they need to take an SAT or an ALSED Law School Admissions Test or a GRE, and they require extra time if they’re going to be able to show what they know. There’s been a very strong — it’s not a movement, I don’t know the right word — but these children are more and more being denied the extra time that they require.

David Boulton: There’s this general failure in the way that we think about assessment, to actually meet the kids in some way that reflects what their situation is.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: That’s right, not to feel that they’re somehow getting away with something, or weak. If somebody needs glasses, you wouldn’t question it, or if a diabetic needs insulin, in the same we know that children, or young adults and adults who have reading problems require extra time. For me, as a physician and as a scientist, one of the most exciting things has been that we’ve been able to now demonstrate that in children who are dyslexic, they don’t develop that word forming area, but they do develop compensatory regions, on the right side of the brain and also in the front, that allow them to read, but not automatically so that they can become highly accurate readers, but by the investment of an extraordinary amount of time and energy. They can get there, but their route is much slower and more inefficient.

David Boulton: Right. There’s some kind of a circuit detour that’s had to happen for them.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Exactly.

David Boulton: Which is slower in processing and results in them needing more time to be as effective in the task.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Right. What I say now is that dyslexia simply robs a person of time, accommodations like extra time return part of it, and that a person who is dyslexic has as much a physiologic need for extra time as a diabetic needs for insulin.

David Boulton: Yes.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Now that we can show that with our brain imaging, that’s made an extraordinary difference. Because I’ve seen too many young people who were applying to graduate school or professional school who struggled their lives to reach the point where they can read accurately, but not automatically, are turned down for extra time. It’s like somebody climbing to the top of a mountain and you suddenly step on their fingers, and don’t let them take that last step, and knock them down. So, it may not sound like an important thing to you, but for all those people who have had difficulty reading it is.

David Boulton: All of these dimensions are critical. We’re looking at the family context, the social context, very particularly at the emotional affective context as well as the cognitive processing challenge.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: That’s at the very — that’s at the heart.

David Boulton: Yes.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: That’s the heart and soul of it. Because you can teach a person to read, and you can do all the things, but if they’ve had that hurt and that pain and that blow to their self-esteem, that’s the most difficult. We have no medicine for that.

David Boulton: Yes. And it’s not just a bad feeling they’re having; it’s fundamentally processing-level debilitating, draining of the efficiency that’s necessary to process the thing that could make them feel better. It works in a downward spiral.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: That’s right.

The Processes of Skilled Reading

Dr. Keith Rayner: Most of my own research is with skilled readers. So I’m interested in: What is it that people do when they’re skilled readers? What are the processes that they engage in?

I largely approach it by recording their eye movements while they read, and then try to infer what the mental processes are. We also do things where we make changes in the text, contingent on the eye movements. So, the classic experiment is one where we control how much you can see on each eye fixation via what’s called the “moving window technique.” Or we have also used another technique called the “boundary technique,” where you’re reading along, and there’s a word off to the right of where your eye is, but then when your eye goes into motion that word changes to another word.

David Boulton: So, you say you’re introducing a confusing or ambiguous situation and seeing what to do with it?

Dr. Keith Rayner: Well, it isn’t ambiguous. What we do is vary the relationship between the first word and the second word, so they can be semantically, phonologically or orthographically related. Then we try to infer what kind of information you would be getting from that word before you got to it, as a function of the relationship between the first and second word, and how long you then look at the word that’s there when your eyes get there.

We’ve done a little of this with children, but it’s mostly done with adults to try and see how much information you’re getting different distances from where your eye is currently looking at the moment.

Then the other thing I do a lot of is have people read sentences or text that do indeed have ambiguities in them, so there would be phonological ambiguity or lexical ambiguities or syntactic ambiguities. So they might read a sentence like, “While Mary was mending, the socks fell off her lap.” And there may or may not be a comma after mending, but if there’s not a comma after was mending, then usually people misplace the sentence because they take the sock to be the object that the verb was mending, and then they’re all messed up. So we try and infer what kind of structures are they building as they read to help them parse the sentence.

Or in the case of lexical ambiguity, they might read a sentence where the word bank is there, and then it turns out that it’s referring to a river bank, rather than a money bank. And so again, we try and see — infer what kind of processes they are using to understand by looking at what their eyes do.

David Boulton: Do you also put multiple tasks in to see whether they stack up to consume more time between fixations?

Dr. Keith Rayner: Well, in fact, there are fixation time differences as a function of these manipulations that we make. The task, for us, is typically always just read the text. Then there are variations in how long people look at things, as a function of these kinds of manipulations that we make.

Word Recognition Timing Thresholds in Skilled Readers

Dr. Keith Rayner: What I know for adults, which is where all of our work is done, is that it takes about fifty milliseconds to get the information into the system. We’ve done experiments where people are reading, and if we mask the text or we take it away, but they get to see it for fifty milliseconds, that’s enough time.

David Boulton: So, by controlling how long something appears, you can find out what the recognition threshold is?

Dr. Keith Rayner: We can get the threshold for: How long does this stuff have to be there to get it into the system? If we leave it up for less than fifty milliseconds then reading falls apart; it’s really disrupted. But if we give them fifty or sixty milliseconds to see the text, then the orthographic information that’s there in front of their eyes gets into the system. It doesn’t matter if the text goes away after that. In fact, there are interesting things like if they’re looking at a low frequency word — so when you read normally, right, and we record your eye movements, you’ll always look longer at a low frequency word than a high frequency word. Even when we take the text away or mask it so it’s not there anymore, the eyes will stay in place longer for the low frequency word than the high frequency word, which is pretty interesting. So, that’s basically saying the mental operations that are involved in figuring out what that word is are driving the eye movements through the text.

David Boulton: So, there’s a loop going on that the eyes are a part of, being directed by, freed up, told to move on, at each iteration of some kind of coherent capture of object.

Dr. Keith Rayner: Yes. We’ve done other experiments where we present — do you know what the word “prime” means?

David Boulton: In the sense that it’s cuing up the — priming you for what’s coming next; it’s creating a decreased field of possibility around what’s coming?

Dr. Keith Rayner: Yes. So, imagine this scenario: You’re reading a sentence, and think of a target word in the sentence somewhere, say it’s the fifth word in the sentence. Before your eyes get to it, there’s just a string of random letters there. So we’re using this technique where we’re going to change things contingent on when your eye moves to that word. We make this change always during a saccade, during the eye movements, so that vision is expressed, you never see this change take place.

David Boulton: A saccade is a…

Dr. Keith Rayner: Saccade is a fancy name for eye movement.

David Boulton: Okay. So, when the eye is in motion is when you create this change so that you don’t actually get an attention blip when you’re on a more static eye fixation.

Dr. Keith Rayner: Right. The change takes place during saccade, you don’t see it. So in our standard boundary paradigm, that’s what would happen, we’d present a string of letters; or we’d present a word and you’d move into the word, and as soon as your eye starts approaching — you know, coming into a word, it changes to another word.

Now, then in a slightly different variation of that, we present a string of random letters where the fifth word should be. Your eye moves into that location. Now we present a prime word, which only stays on the screen for the first thirty or forty milliseconds of the eye fixation, and then it changes to the word that’s going to be there the rest of the time. Now, this change will get seen, because it’s happening during a fixation. There are two changes in this particular paradigm. What we do in those experiments is we vary the orthographic phonological or semantic relationship between the prime word and the target word.

David Boulton: So, you’re actually wanting to see how they recover from their own prediction?

Dr. Keith Rayner: Well, it’s not necessarily their prediction. It’s how much use they’re able to get in that early time frame of something that’s orthographically similar or phonologically similar or semantically similar to the target word.

David Boulton: Okay.

The Milliseconds Between Orthography and Phonology

Dr. Keith Rayner: What we find is that the orthography kicks in very quickly, so that over the whole priming interval that we look at the orthography, if the prime word is orthographically similar to the target word, you get some facilitation. But what’s really interesting to me is the phonology kicks in really quickly, too. I mean, it’s lagging behind the orthography only by about five or ten milliseconds, so that the orthographic information is getting in very quickly, but you’re quickly converting that to a phonological representation.

We’ve also done experiments, going back, now, to the first — to the paradigm I mentioned, where there’s just one change. So think of this: You’re reading and the word beach is your target word b-e-a-c-h. Now, before you get to that word, it could say, b-e-e-c-h, which is a homophone of b-e-a-c-h; or is could say b-e-n-c-h, which is orthographically very similar. Or it could just be another word like house, which is just totally unrelated to the prior word.

David Boulton: Right. Different levels of disruption to the expectation field that’s unfolding.

Dr. Keith Rayner: Yes. So, what we find is that you get facilitation from having the homophone, above and beyond having the orthographic control word, so that when people’s eyes land there, one of those things was there first, either the homophone beech or the orthographic control word bench or the unrelated word, or the identical word is there, so b-e-a-c-h could be there.

David Boulton: Yes.

Dr. Keith Rayner: Then we look at: How long does it take to process this target word b-e-a-c-h as a function of what was there before? If the homophone was there before, you’re about as fast as if the identical word was there and you’re faster than if b-e-n-c-h was there. So before you get to a word, before the eyes actually fixate on it there’s a preview benefit; you get some facilitation of the upcoming word, and phonology, again, is kicking in very quickly.

David Boulton: So, is that suggesting, you think, that somehow the phonological processing is being primed?

Dr. Keith Rayner: Yes, the phonological information is being primed. You’re getting a head start on the phonological information before your eyes actually get to the word.

Basic vs. Proficiency