ABOUT one in 20 adults in the US is not literate in English, meaning 11 million people in the country lack the skills to handle many everyday tasks, a study released by the US National Assessment of Adult Literacy shows.
According to the study, "A First Look at the Literacy of America's Adults in the 21st Century", from 1992 to 2003, adults made no progress in their ability to read sentences and paragraphs or understand other printed material such as prescription labels.
Literacy is defined as using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential. The assessment questions focused on everyday tasks such as reading newspaper and magazine articles, calculating utility bills and using bus schedules.
"As a nation, we should be concerned that millions of adults in this country lack the literacy skills to complete a job application, vote, use the Internet, or read a bedtime story to a child," said Sharon Darling, president and founder of the US National Center for Family Literacy.
The study shows that adult literacy dropped or was flat across every level of education, from people with graduate degrees to those who dropped out of high school. And the adults deemed illiterate in English include people who might be fluent in Spanish or another language but cannot comprehend English text at its most simple level.
Some 30 million adults have below basic skills in prose. Their ability is so limited that they might not be able to make sense of a simple pamphlet, for example. This total includes 7 million adults considered not to be literate in English but with enough knowledge of the language at least to be tested. The remaining 4 million deemed illiterate did not have enough English skills to be tested. By comparison, 95 million adults, or 44 per cent of the population, have intermediate prose skills, meaning they can do moderately challenging activities.
"Eleven million people is an awfully large number of folks who are not literate in English and therefore are prevented access to what America offers," said Russ Whitehurst, director of the Institute of Education Sciences at the US Department of Education. Margaret Spellings, the US Education Secretary, pledged to coordinate adult education programmes across the government.
