Illiterate Word Family

[Enon Zoberman]

Inthe end, there was no space to hide it any longer, no room left to evade or disguise. It was silence itself that revealed the condition. Unexpectedly and brutally stricken with Covid, my father ended up critically ill in ICU. Breathing via a ventilator and tracheostomy, it was impossible for him to talk. When the nurses approached him with pen and paper, and then an alphabet chart to point at in order to communicate, he waved them away. At first, they thought it was intransigence, but it soon became clear what the real issue was. Though an avid reader, he could not spell even the simplest of words.

All my life, I had thought that my father had escaped the drowning machine. I believed he had extricated himself from a youth of deprivation, violence, and prison. He had done so by choosing his family, his trade, his camaraderie with his workmates, his music, his bodybuilding, his love of nature, his stoicism. He was a proud man, who showed me how to live and how to die with bravery and nobility. He would never have claimed to have been a victim.

That really does seem to confirm my post. But I feel that you took my comment out of context a little, which was that learning difficulties are different from disruptive students who have no respect for learning. Those who have learning difficulties are helped more than they have in the past, and they are not to be judged because of their learning difficulties. But the others have no real excuse for not engaging with the opportunities given to them,

There are also many parents who would love to help their children but are possibly illiterate themselves or who do not speak English. Children who lack home support, say with homework, are at a tremendous disadvantage. Many of those children, along with their parents, long to do well.

My PhD holding brother-in-law recently told me that he has never read a book just for pleasure. As someone who gets very twitchy without something to read, I was staggered. (We are both in our seventies.)

If you would like to help people learn how to read, please find your nearest Read Easy group and volunteer. They offer one-to-one coaching to people who struggle with reading all run by volunteers. I have just set up a group in my area and I already have a list of 20 people who need to learn how to read. There is a real need out there. Or if you cannot volunteer, please donate to your nearest Read Easy group.

Why? Are you supposed to attend a diversity lecture? Or is there some weird teaching method they expect you to adopt? My wife suffered from being taught some whole word flash card method in the 1970s.

If you look at Marriage records of the last century it is striking how many were unable to sign their own name let alone meet the standards of literacy embraced today in functional illiteracy. There were then large ranges of occupations that did not require even the most minimal literacy. That is no longer the case.

At the same time more and more information and entertainment can be absorbed from the TV, YouTube and other videos reducing the incentive for anyone suffering from dyslexia to keep up the struggle to read. Those who read for pleasure are becoming a minority in the population. Many other skills that we previously took for granted would be widespread such as the ability to cook have been similarly affected by modern technology such as the convenience provided by the fast food industry. The easy availability of digital music has devastated the number of those able to play the piano or other instrument. There has been a reduction in many previously widespread skills.We have become more dependant in many ways and the exercise of many skills has become illegal unless you have the right up to date certificates.

I agree that we need to look at the teachers rather than jump to blaming students and their families. I worked occasionally with teachers whose main skill was successfully hiding ineptitude. Many parents lack the confidence to challenge this.

This was one of the reasons I think the last Labour government made it so difficult for pubs, as they used to be, to survive. The old pubs pre-1998 when beer was more easily affordable were where the working class gathered, talked and shared ideas and thoughts; much much too dangerous for the social engineering New Labour had planned.

Is that really true? The fact that Read Easy exists suggests otherwise. I live in Australia and I see ads on tv encouraging adults to take part in learning and there are many organisations out there teaching literacy to adults and immigrants. It may not be a big media subject, but who cares, they only muddy the waters over issues of poverty and so on.

When I was doing my army basic training in 1970 we had a few chaps who were discovered to be functionally illiterate or innumerate or both. If they managed to get though the basic training they were sent to a unit run by the Army Education Corp who in three months managed to teach them what ten years of compulsory education had failed to do. These were not inadequate people but had been failed by the school system and/or their parents.

Choosing to ignore the personal circumstances, this article is just a blinkered guardianista view of the world, where liberals are blinded by their bleeding hearts into creating permanent victims of the poor and ethnic minorities.

Illiteracy is not everything. It is prejudice that makes it hell for those excluded from it. Temple Grandin in her new book, Visual Thinkers, points out that reading is not the be all and end all of life. We need people proud of their practical abilities like farmers and other manual workers because without them our technological world would starve to death and leave us with no roof over our heads, literally.

I was only eight years old when I had to leave my family in the quetchua community in Ayacucho, Peru, for the outskirts of Lima. I had managed to learn Spanish by myself, and my primary school teacher took me in to live with her family and to help with the chores in her home. All I received in exchange were some old clothes and whatever food was left on the table. I was not even allowed to sit at the table with them, or eat with the same cutlery, let alone receive visits from my school friends.

What got me through those moments was a story that my parents had shared with me since I was a little girl. I could almost visualize it: the helplessness of my parents after losing my new-born brother and not being able to pursue any legal inquiry about his death, simply because they did not speak Spanish or know how to read and write. My illiterate parents pushed me to learn more, to see more and to do more. So, I persevered.

Chirapaq, the non-profit I founded together with Juanita del Rosal, was born in 1986 to support the cultural reaffirmation of indigenous peoples with a strong human rights approach. Because I could not talk about culture without talking about its people, and its people were being discriminated, attacked and killed. Indigenous women not only need the same opportunities as everyone else, they need specific opportunities to affirm their identity and become aware of their own rights.

Literacy is the ability to read and write. Some researchers suggest that the study of "literacy" as a concept can be divided into two periods: the period before 1950, when literacy was understood solely as alphabetical literacy (word and letter recognition); and the period after 1950, when literacy slowly began to be considered as a wider concept and process, including the social and cultural aspects of reading and writing[1] and functional literacy.[2][3]

The range of definitions of literacy used by NGOs, think tanks, and advocacy groups since the 1990s suggests that this shift in understanding from "discrete skill" to "social practice" is both ongoing and uneven. Some definitions remain fairly closely aligned with the traditional "ability to read and write" connotation, whereas others take a broader view:

The concept of multiliteracies has gained currency, particularly in English Language Arts curricula, on the grounds that reading "is interactive and informative, and occurs in ever-increasingly technological settings where information is part of spatial, audio, and visual patterns (Rhodes & Robnolt, 2009)".[26][27][verification needed] Objections have been raised that this concept downplays the importance of reading instruction that focuses on "alphabetic representations".[28] However, these are not mutually exclusive, as children can become proficient in word-reading while engaging with multiliteracies.[29]

Between 3500 BCE and 3000 BCE, in southern Mesopotamia, the ancient Sumerians invented writing.[52] During this era, literacy was "a largely functional matter, propelled by the need to manage the new quantities of information and the new type of governance created by trade and large scale production".[53] Early writing systems first emerged as a recording system in which people used tokens with impressed markings to manage trade and agricultural production.[54] The token system served as a precursor to early cuneiform writing once people began recording information on clay tablets. Proto-Cuneiform texts exhibit not only numerical signs but also ideograms depicting objects being counted.[50] Though the traditional view had been that cuneiform literacy was restricted to a class of scribes, assyriologists including Claus Wilcke and Dominique Charpin have argued that functional literacy was somewhat widespread by the Old Babylonian period.[55][56] Nonetheless, professional scribes became central to law, finances, accounting, government, administration, medicine, magic, divination, literature, and prayers.[57]

Egyptian hieroglyphs emerged between 3300 BCE and 3100 BCE; the iconography emphasized power among royals and other elites. The Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system was the first notation system to have phonetic values; these symbols are called phonograms.[58]

Indus script is largely pictorial and has not yet been deciphered; as such, it is unknown whether it includes abstract signs. It is thought that they wrote from right to left and that the script is logographic. Because it has not been deciphered, linguists disagree on whether it is a complete and independent writing system; however, it is generally thought to be an independent writing system that emerged in the Harappa culture.[61]

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