• Reading: Literacy in decline

• Books vs Electronics

  As a school teacher, I have watched with dismay the decline in literacy, not only in Britain, but right across the world. Along with concerned parents, teachers, university professors and even politicians, I question why. There is no simple answer to that question nor, unfortunately, is there a quick and easy solution to the problem. The problem is a complex and multi-faceted one, beginning with the astounding advances which we have seen in technology over the course of the past 50 years. This, at face value, could be seen to be a contradiction in terms as one would expect literacy to improve with technological advances and not show the alarming decline which we have witnessed. But if we examine the impact that these advances have had on the lives of children and how the mind set of children has undergone such a radical change, it becomes evident that technology is at least partially responsible. Books now face fierce competition in the form of television, computers, gaming consoles, ipods and even mobile phones to name just a few of the exciting distractions available. Children are constantly ‘plugged in’ to some device or other and seldom bother to bury their noses in a book – unless they are forced to.

  • Hub Pages teacher discussing the worldwide decline of literacy.

• Increasing Pressure on Teachers

  The third problem arises in the classroom itself. Teachers face increasing pressures today which their counterparts of 50 years ago did not have to deal with. The ever increasing lack of discipline in the classroom has seriously undermined the authority of teachers causing a breakdown in the system. If children cannot be controlled effectively, they cannot be taught effectively. It is as simple as that. Add to this the increasing work load on teachers and an ever-changing curriculum and it is scarcely any wonder that teachers suffer stress and burn-out. A stressed teacher is not the best teacher. Also quite a simple equation.

• Read to Your Children

  Like I said, there is no quick and easy solution. Having said that I do believe there are things which can be done to address the problem. But it is going to require a concerted effort on the part of teachers and parents alike to bring about any meaningful change.

  The first step is to try to limit the use of ipods, mobiles, computer games, television and the like and to attempt to implement a reading programme which is followed daily. This obviously has to be done in the home and is going to require the co-operation of both parents to achieve. When I was a student many years ago, I remember it being said: a child being read to, is the first step towards a child wanting to read themselves. Wise words. Parents need to read to their children on a daily basis. 20 – 30 minutes of reading with no other distractions. In other words, television is switched off! An added bonus is it will be a wonderful time of bonding with your child. It will also be necessary to build up a collection of good books in the home which children can be encouraged to read. With this aim in mind, we need to ask ourselves what the primary motivation for getting our children to read actually is. Is it for enjoyment or is it to instruct or learn? The answer is, both really but in my opinion the main reason for reading should be for the sheer pleasure of it. A child who enjoys reading will want to read and will want to learn. The child who does not enjoy reading will most certainly not want to learn. So, the primary aim is to foster a love of reading in the child and we the reading material should be selected accordingly.

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• Declining Literacy: Do the Textbooks Contribute to the Problem?

• Here are the facts. The Department of Education’s National Adult Literacy survey of 1992 revealed that over 50% of American adults over the age of 16 were functionally illiterate. The tragic news is that the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy reveals that the "average  prose and document literacy did not differ significantly from 1992."¹

   

  Defining literacy 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 found that "average prose literacy decreased for all levels of educational attainment between 1992  and 2003" although "the educational attainment of America’s adults increased between 1992 and 2003." Even though more adults have completed more education, their reading is weaker.

   

  But wait—there’s more troubling news. A recent report from ACT, the nonprofit American College Testing program, reveals that "only half of the 1.2 million high school seniors who took its test in 2005 are prepared for the reading requirements of a first-year college course."²

   

  The impact of this declining literacy is far-reaching. A related study conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts presents "a detailed but bleak assessment of the decline of reading’s role in the nation’s culture." Entitled Reading at Risk, the report of this survey of national trends among American adults reveals that "literary reading in America is not only declining rapidly among all groups, but the rate of decline has accelerated, especially among the young."³

   

  But it’s not just reading literacy that seems problematic; our students are having problems with math and science as well. The most recent results from the Program for International Student Assessment, which measures math, reading, and science literacy among 15-year-olds every three years, reveal that "U.S. students scored below the international average in total math literacy" and the "U.S. score in science, which  was average in 2000, fell below average in 2003.

• Why do our students struggle? Some blame television and other technological distractions. But Patrick Welsh, high school English teacher from  Alexandria, Virginia, faults mainstream textbooks for a large part of the problem. He bemoans the declining literacy but takes some of the blame. Acknowledging that "we saddle students with textbooks that would turn off even the most passionate reader," Welsh labels these books  "feather-weight intellectually."⁵

   

  And he’s not alone. Textbooks critics in all academic disciplines describe books that are "dumbed down" intellectually. Let’s start with the textbooks that teach reading.

   

  In his 1995 book entitled Dumbing Down Our Kids, Charles Sykes summarizes the history of reading textbook development in the 80s and 90s that preferred the holistic, rather than the phonics, approach to teaching reading. He concludes that these "faddish techniques for teaching reading" have produced "a generation of illiterates."⁶

   

  Although recent reading textbooks again emphasize phonics, the damage done seems to have far-reaching ramifications. The mainstream textbook  publishers have adjusted the books in all disciplines to the students’ inability to read. Rather than raising the bar, they’ve lowered it to accommodate the lower-reading levels of most students.

   

  Gilbert Sewall, president of the Center for Education Studies and director of the American Textbook Council, claims that "new textbook editions across the curriculum reflect lowered sights for general education. Textbook makers are adjusting to short attention spans and nonreaders." Their solutions are picture and activity books that combine "high cost, unconscionable bulk, and instructional confusion" rather than "clear, portable, simply designed, text-centered primers."⁷

   

  Patrick Welsh describes the leading high school literature textbooks as weighing in at 7 pounds and 1,500 pages but filled with excerpts from literature rather than whole works. These huge books contain only 15–19 complete short stories and 0–4 plays but 35–45 excerpts from various works. He describes books "full of obtrusive directions, comments, questions and pictures that would hinder even the attentive readers from becoming absorbed in the reading."⁸

   

  History textbooks seem to have similar characteristics. Gilbert Sewall, testifying before the Senate, describes history textbook content as "thinner and thinner." He explains, "Too many children cannot or do not want to read history, which contains concrete facts and complicated concepts, reading that requires some facility with language. So textbooks become picture and activity books instead."⁹

   

  English and history textbooks are obvious victims of this faulty pedagogical philosophy of the textbook industry. But math and science textbooks also fall prey to the tendency to "dumb down" the books.

   

  In fact, the book Why Schools Matter, based on research from the Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS), faults U.S. textbooks for the poor performance of U.S. students on international achievement tests. This research shows "powerful evidence that textbooks exert a strong influence on what teachers teach, . . . and the levels of performances and accomplishments expected of students."¹⁰

   

  This report from the TIMSS study prompted the American Association for the Advancement of Science to conduct Project 2061, an evaluation of precollege mathematics and science textbooks. This study concludes that most textbooks at these levels "cover too many topics and fail to develop any of them well." Like the literature textbooks, the math and science books are "too large, too encyclopedic, and too loosely structured pedagogically."¹¹

   

  Puzzled by the content, structure, and style of these textbooks, one textbook critic observes, "It’s as if their authors had decided above all not to expose students to the intellectual rigor that is the lifeblood of science."¹²

   

  And she’s not alone in her opinion. Chester Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, concludes that his organization’s review of the textbook industry "shows plainly that liberals, conservatives, independent scholars, and academic review panels alike share a surprising unanimity about the deplorable state of today’s textbooks."¹³

   

  It is time for parents, teachers, and administrators to reject these mainstream textbooks and seek educational materials elsewhere. There’s too much at stake to maintain the status quo. Our students deserve better. They need books that challenge—books characterized by depth of content, literary quality, and pedagogical effectiveness. If we want our children to succeed, we must give their teachers the tools they need.

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• Students Failing English Due to Twitter, Facebook
• The freeform writing style of social networks like Twitter and Facebook is changing the way people communicate, and causing students to fail English. That's the claim of a piece out this afternoon from the Canadian Press. According to the article “(at) Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, one in 10 new students are not qualified to take the mandatory writing courses required for graduation.” And academicians are, in part, blaming social networking.
• I was interviewed for this, and I share the view that students who let social network style, like SMS (text) abbreviations, such as L8R, and emoticons (like smiley faces) slip into their more formal communications, run the risk of being viewed as poor communicators by very influential people, such as potential employers and graduate school review boards. These things:
• “say to me … ‘well, this person doesn't think very clearly, and they're not very good at analyzing complex subjects, and they're not very good at expressing themselves, or … they can't spell, and they can't punctuate,' These folks are going to short-change themselves, and right or wrong, they're looked down upon in traditional corporations.”
• So have fun when you're online, but remember. Almost everything you “say” and do is visible to the entire world, including people who can make a difference in helping you achieve your objectives. And even if the social media gurus tell you the old rules have been thrown out, and communications has gone informal, and you should be yourself, someone apparently forgot to send that memo to our universities and corporations.

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• What Is Literacy?

   

  The definition of literacy is thus: "... not simply knowing how to read and write a particular script, but applying this knowledge for specific purposes in specific contexts of use" (Scribner 236). Some claim that the Internet affects literacy drastically.

   

  In an era of computers, televisions, and video games, screens dominate lives, whereas in previous eras, books and people were the most important and effective ways to gain knowledge. The Internet is not always a trustworthy resource, and its aimlessness damages the attention span. The ability to make inferences and logical conclusions has decreased since the creation of the computer. In a world dominated by technology, primarily the Internet, literacy has decreased dramatically, so much so that children of the twenty-first century are less able to process and analyze textual details.

• Information Discrepancy

   

  Most scientists assume that the children of this age are prepared for the computer era, and that they will learn to analyze and infer through the Internet. Terry Egan, who led a team that developed a test to measure "information and communication-technology" literacy, "assumed the generation was so comfortable with technology that they knew how to use it for research and deeper thinking" (Wallis 37).

   

  Their experiment revealed that such a hypothesis was false. Children's reading scores have actually declined dramatically since the creation of the computer. Part of the decline in literacy is because of Internet discrepancy. Many readers misjudge the accuracy of information online. A study in New York asked 48 students to look at a spoof website about a mythical animal species. Almost 90 percent thought the site was a "reliable resource" (Rich 3). Combing through untrustworthy sites is tedious in a student's quest for knowledge, and only lowers the attention span.
• The Internet damages the ability to analyze because of its unreliability; its resources are not always accurate, and deep, concentrated reading is scarcely found. "As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens to artificial intelligence" (Carr 5). The Internet's damage on literacy through disparity of information affects the reader's ability to analyze and infer textual details.

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• Literacy experts and educators say they are stunned by the results of a recent adult literacy assessment, which shows that the reading proficiency of college graduates has declined in the past decade, with no obvious explanation. 

   

   

   "It's appalling -- it's really astounding," said Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association and a librarian at California State University at Fresno. "Only 31 percent of college graduates can read a complex book and extrapolate from it. That's not saying much for the remainder." 

   

   While more Americans are graduating from college, and more than ever are applying for admission, far fewer are leaving higher education with the skills needed to comprehend routine data, such as reading a table about the relationship between blood pressure and physical activity, according to the federal study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics. 

   

   Experts could not definitively explain the drop. 

• "The declining impact of education on our adult population was the biggest surprise for us, and we just don't have a good explanation," said Mark S. Schneider, commissioner of education statistics. "It may be that institutions have not yet figured out how to teach a whole generation of students who learned to read on the computer and who watch more TV. It's a different kind of literacy." 

   

   "What's disturbing is that the assessment is not designed to test your understanding of Proust, but to test your ability to read labels," he added. 

• The test measures how well adults comprehend basic instructions and tasks through reading -- such as computing costs per ounce of food items, comparing viewpoints on two editorials and reading prescription labels. Only 41 percent of graduate students tested in 2003 could be classified as "proficient" in prose -- reading and understanding information in short texts -- down 10 percentage points since 1992. Of college graduates, only 31 percent were classified as proficient -- compared with 40 percent in 1992. Schneider said the results do not separate recent graduates from those who have been out of school several years or more. 

   

   The results were based on a sample of more than 19,000 people 16 or older, who were interviewed in their homes. They were asked to read prose, do math and find facts in documents. The scores for "intermediate" reading abilities went up for college students, causing educators to question whether most college instruction is offered at the intermediate level because students face reading challenges. 

• Other experts noted that the slip in scores could be attributed to most state schools not being particularly selective, accepting most high school graduates to bolster enrollment. In addition, Schneider said schools may not be taking into account a more diverse population, and the language and cultural barriers that come with shifting demographics. 

   

   That would account for the dramatic drop in average prose literacy for Hispanics, which slipped by 18 percentage points, he said. "The Hispanic scores were somewhat understandable based on the changing demographics," Schneider said. "Diversity may lead to more difficulties in education." 

   

   Dolores Perin, a reading expert at Columbia University Teachers College, said that her work has indicated that the issue may start at the high school level. "There is a tremendous literacy problem among high school graduates that is not talked about," said Perin, who has been sitting in on high school classes as part of a teaching project. "It's a little bit depressing. The colleges are left holding the bag, trying to teach students who have challenges." 

   

   On average, adult literacy is virtually unchanged since 1992, with 30 million people struggling with basic reading tasks. While adults made some progress in quantitative literacy, such as the ability to calculate taxes, the study showed that from 1992 to 2003 adults made no improvement in their ability read newspapers or books, or comprehend basic forms. 

   

   One bright spot is that blacks are making significant gains in reading and math and are reaching higher levels of education. For instance, the report showed that the average rate of prose literacy, or reading, among blacks rose six percentage points since 1992. Prose and document reading scores for whites remained the same. 

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• Little or no grammar teaching, cell phone texting, social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, are all being blamed for an increasingly unacceptable number of post-secondary students who can't write.

   

  For years there's been a flood of anecdotal complaints from professors about what they say is the wretched state of English grammar coming from some of their students. Now there seems to be some solid evidence.

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  Ontario's Waterloo University is one of the few post-secondary institutions in Canada to require the students they accept to pass an exam testing their English language skills. Almost a third of those students are failing.

   

  "Thirty per cent of students who are admitted are not able to pass at a minimum level," says Ann Barrett, managing director of the English language proficiency exam at Waterloo University. "We would certainly like it to be a lot lower."

   

  Barrett says the failure rate has jumped five percentage points in the past few years, up to 30 per cent from 25 per cent.

• Punctuation errors are huge, and apostrophe errors. Students seem to have absolutely no idea what an apostrophe is for. None. Absolutely none. Paul Budra, an English professor and associate dean of arts and science at Simon Fraser University

   
   
   

  Even those with good marks out of Grade 12, so-called elite students, "still can't pass our simple test," she says.

   

  Poor grammar is the major reason students fail, says Barrett.

   

  "If a student has problems with articles, prepositions, verb tenses, that's a problem."

   

  Some students in public schools are no longer being taught grammar, she believes.
• At Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, one in 10 new students are not qualified to take the mandatory writing courses required for graduation. That 10 per cent must take so-called "foundational" writing courses first.

• Emoticons, truncated and butchered words such as 'cuz,' are just some of the writing horrors being handed in, say professors and administrators at Simon Fraser.

   

  "Little happy faces ... or a sad face ... little abbreviations," show up even in letters of academic appeal, says Khan Hemani. "Instead of 'because', it's 'cuz'. That's one I see fairly frequently," she says, and these are new in the past five years.

   

  Khan Hemani sends appeal submissions with emoticons in them back to students to be re-written "because a committee will immediately get their backs up when they see that kind of written style."

   

  Professors are seeing their share of bad grammar in essays as well.

• "The words 'a lot' have become one word, for everyone, as far as I can tell. 'Definitely' is always spelled with an 'a' - 'definately'. I don't know why," says Paul Budra, an English professor and associate dean of arts and science at Simon Fraser.

   

  "Punctuation errors are huge, and apostrophe errors. Students seem to have absolutely no idea what an apostrophe is for. None. Absolutely none."

   

  He is floored by some of what he sees.

   

  "I get their essays and I go 'You obviously don't know what a sentence fragment is. You think commas are sort of like parmesan cheese that you sprinkle on your words'," said Budra.

   

  Then he's reduced to teaching basic grammar to them himself.

   

  He says this has been going on now for the 20 years he's taught college and university in B.C. and Ontario-only the mistakes have changed.

   

  He too blames poor - or no - grammar instruction in lower schools.

   

  "When I went to high school in the '70s I was never taught grammar in English. I learned grammar from Latin classes."

   

  Budra was taught to read and write using whole language rather than phonetics - not a good way to go in his books.

• Cellphone texting and social networking on Internet sites are degrading writing skills, say even experts in the field.

   

  "I think it has," says Joel Postman, author of "SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate," who has taught Fortune 500 companies how to use social networking.

   

  The Internet norm of ignoring punctuation and capitalization as well as using emoticons may be acceptable in an e-mail to friends and family, but it can have a deadly effect on one's career if used at work.

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• As more schools begin allowing students to bring their own devices and actually use them in class, the debate around the value of “digital writing” — texting, taking notes on mobile devices, tweeting, etc. — is heating up.

   

  Some educators (and even a linguistic expert) believe kids who text are exercising a different, additional muscle when texting, writing, and note-taking — and that skill is actually adding to a student’s growing and changing repertoire.

   

  “Children know that when you’re in school, you do not use texting language,” said linguistics expert Susana Sotillo, an associate professor at Montclair State University in an article in the North Jersey Record. “…No one is destroying the English language; the English language just keeps changing. It’s not a good idea to present change as a negative aspect.”

• THE VALUE OF DIGITAL WRITING

   

  Apart from whether texting is degrading or adding value to traditional writing, there are other factors to consider when it comes to the digital writing genre. Jeff Gabrill, a writing professor at Michigan State University, and his colleagues just released a study called Revisualizing Composition: Mapping the Writing Lives of First-Year College Students.

   

  The study, which examined 1,366 students enrolled in first-year writing class, shows that texts on mobile devices, emails, and lecture notes are “three of the most frequently written genres (or types) of writing.” In fact, almost half of the participants — 46 percent — said that “texting was the kind of writing that they performed more than any other.”

   

  Compared to school work, students surveyed said they valued texting (47 percent), writing academic papers (45 percent), and taking lecture notes (43 percent), as the top three most valuable forms of writing. “This was surprising to us,” Gabrill said at a talk at the recent SXSWEdu conference. “The lore for writing and literacy teachers is that students would rather be beaten with a stick than do writing work, but it’s not true.”

   

  But what’s also noteworthy is here that 93 percent of participants said they wrote for personal fulfillment. Why’s this important? “This finding is especially interesting given the fact that participants were solicited through academic avenues (e.g. college email addresses, course websites) and sometimes took the survey in college classrooms, where we might expect them to focus on school-sponsored motivations for writing.”

• And that might be the connection between texting and “work” writing — one form might feed and facilitate the other.

   

  “Our students write more than any generation in history,” Gabrill said. “They have to be doing something right.”

   

  Gabrill said some of his colleagues “freak out” when they see students typing on their cell phones. “They want all the attention on them, and they think that many are screwing around,” he said. “I just assume that I’m so engaging that they actually are using their devices to write notes.”

   

  Students’ mobile devices are legitimate platforms for writing, Gabrill argues, and it would behoove schools and teachers to accommodate what changes that might bring on.

   

  “We are in the midst of massive changes in our writing lives,” he said. “Digital writing matters, and our challenge in education is to figure out how it matters in order to ensure that we can be useful to those interested in leveraging it.”

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• Literacy has been under siege for some time. The supposed agents of this threat have changed over the years but the perception remains constant.

• Television, movies, video games, mobile phones, and the Internet have all been identified as the culprits that rot the brain, desensitize, delude, and generally ruin the minds of the young (and perhaps everyone else too). At the core of much of this concern is the perceived decline of literacy.

   

  One of the most passionate and eloquent commentators on this decline and its impact is Chris Hedges. In Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009), he notes,

   

  “The illiterate, the semiliterate, and those who live as though they are illiterate are effectively cut off form the past They live in an eternal present.”

   

  This “eternal present” is comprised of “comforting, reassuring images, fantasies, slogans, celebrities, and a lust for violence.” It is a world devoid of substance, dislocated from history, reflection, and nuance.
• The media and popular press point clearly to new technologies as the cause of this decline but also, ironically, as the source of the “new literacy.” Texting, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and countless other technologies and media are widely seen as undermining or displacing literacy. Not so. They are certainly changing our relationship with literacy and altering what it means to be literate in a ubiquitous multimedia world. But all these things are intimately linked to literacy.

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• The Decreasing Literacy Skills of the Workforce – Changing Responsibilities of Business Training Programs
• In 2001, the American Management Association found that one-third of job applicants flunked basic literacy and math tests. 
  
  There is plenty of evidence that literacy skills continue to decline. U.S. government data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that after years of educational reforms, high school seniors scored worse on a national reading test than they had back in 1992. Less than three-quarters of U.S. 12th graders scored at at least the “basic” level, down from 80% in the early 1990s. 
  
  Some technology advocates, like William Crossman, author of “VIVO (Voice-In/Voice-Out): The Coming Age of Talking Computers,” aren’t concerned about this loss of literacy. Crossman says, “Just as the car replaced the horse and wagon, speech and graphics and video streaming over the Internet will replace written texts, and talking computers will replace text-driven computers.” This optimistic prediction isn’t borne out in most workplace environments, where most computer equipment is years old. And anyone who has tried speech recognition systems knows that they have a long way to go.
• Employers view reading and writing as critical basic skills, yet they are often at a loss about how to improve those skills among their workforce without incurring huge costs and loss of on-the-job time. Training programs abound to train managers and staff about project and budget control and various technical disciplines, but few programs exist to teach basic skills and employers find it difficult to justify such expenditures. 
  
  The Center for Lifelong Learning was created to address these and other pressing literacy issues. 
  
  We believe that the problem of the decline in literacy is exacerbated by the fact that nearly everyone is taught to read using techniques that modern education and brain researchers have proven to be antiquated. Since the beginning of mass education in the U.S., students have been taught to read, starting in Kindergarten, in ways that have been shown to be the opposite of the way our brains work. 
  
  Ever gotten drowsy while you read? Ever lost your place and spent many minutes trying to find it, then forgetting what you read? Ever suddenly become aware that you have no idea what you have read for the last few pages? Ever finished a book and 15 minutes later have little idea what it was about? Remember being told by your 1st and 2nd grade teachers that the slower you read the more you will remember? But don’t you get sleepier the slower you read? 
  
  Most people attribute their reading problems to their own failings as students. Yet the problem is really the techniques they were taught to use, not their brain and its native capabilities. 
  
  Researchers have found that the reality is that the faster you read, the more you remember. It’s the way our brains are designed. In school, kids are taught to read one word at a time, to stop reading at the end of a line until they reach the left side of the page again, and, worst of all, to say the words out loud in their head. All of these practices are exactly the opposite of the reality of the way our brains want information delivered.

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• The Future of Reading

   

    Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? 

• Last fall the National Endowment for the Arts issued a sobering report linking flat or declining national reading test scores among teenagers with the slump in the proportion of adolescents who said they read for fun.

  According to Department of Education data cited in the report, just over a fifth of 17-year-olds said they read almost every day for fun in 2004, down from nearly a third in 1984. Nineteen percent of 17-year-olds said they never or hardly ever read for fun in 2004, up from 9 percent in 1984. (It was unclear whether they thought of what they did on the Internet as “reading.”)

  “Whatever the benefits of newer electronic media,” Dana Gioia, the chairman of the N.E.A., wrote in the report’s introduction, “they provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading.”

  Children are clearly spending more time on the Internet. In a study of 2,032 representative 8- to 18-year-olds, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that nearly half used the Internet on a typical day in 2004, up from just under a quarter in 1999. The average time these children spent online on a typical day rose to one hour and 41 minutes in 2004, from 46 minutes in 1999.

  The question of how to value different kinds of reading is complicated because people read for many reasons. There is the level required of daily life — to follow the instructions in a manual or to analyze a mortgage contract. Then there is a more sophisticated level that opens the doors to elite education and professions. And, of course, people read for entertainment, as well as for intellectual or emotional rewards.

  It is perhaps that final purpose that book champions emphasize the most.

  “Learning is not to be found on a printout,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, said in a commencement address at Boston College in May. “It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.”

• Boys and Literacy (Patrick Molicard-Chartier)

     

   

  According to the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), girls are outperforming boys in reading and writing and the gap widens as students progress through the grades. This trend also reflects attitudes towards literacy. The TDSB claims that boys are 3-5 times more likely to be diagnosed with a reading and/or learning disability, that boys read fewer books with less comprehension and also write with inferior fluency and style compared to their female counterparts.

   

  So how do we get boys more interested in literacy? Many research studies have examined this issue as well as school boards and ministries of education around the world. If only the answer could be so simple! Clearly, simply exposing boys to books and literacy isn’t working the way many educators had hoped it would. It’s only a recent development that comic books and graphic novels are considered acceptable reading materials. These materials are more common in libraries today than when I was in elementary school (which really wasn’t that long ago!) Boys are reading more graphic novels and comics, but is this enough?

   

  What if we get boys into literacy by post-literate means?  By this I mean something along the lines of video games. Video games are very sophisticated storytelling vehicles that complement literacy skills. They contain plot, setting, narrative, characters, introductions and conclusions, not to mention many other facets of literacy. So let’s embrace what they love and turn video games into learning tools for the betterment of boys as well as girls and educators. If we are preparing children for the future by focusing on the values of the past, then we will surely kill literacy and alienate a whole generation of boys.

• The explosion of social media has completely changed the way we communicate with each other. Whether via laptop computers, advanced mobile devices, Wi-Fi or enhanced 4G wireless networks, we are more connected than ever to everyone we know.

• While this communications boom has been praised for its educational benefits, some argue that a negative side effect is beginning to take hold in our classrooms. Cyber slang is suspected of damaging students’ writing acumen.

   

    Cyber slang is a term used to describe shortcuts, alternative words, or even symbols used to convey thoughts in an electronic document. Because so many digital media limit the number of characters an author can use at a time, students are becoming more creative to get the most out of their limited space. Common cyber-slang terms that have made their way into popular speech include BFF (best friends forever), LOL (laugh out loud) and WTF (what the ____).

   

    “I think it makes sense for these social conversations to be lightweight or light-hearted in terms of the syntax,” said President of Dictionary.com Shravan Goli. “But ultimately, in the world of business and in the world they will live in, in terms of their jobs and professional lives, students will need good, solid reading and writing skills. I’m a little worried about where we are in America with literacy levels dropping. Are these [electronic devices] helping us, or making it worse? I think they may be going the other way and making it worse.”

   

    The Times Daily newspaper cites a recent report from Pew Internet and American Life Project, "Writing, Technology and Teens," which found that the cell phone text-based abbreviated communications teens use are showing up in more formal writing.

   

    One only has to spend about two minutes browsing the public pages of a social media platform like Facebook to find examples of cyber slang. In some cases, a second and third read is required before a sentence begins to make sense. A public Facebook page entitled “If you think the rules at UnionCounty High School are ridiculous,” dealing with school policies in Union, S.C. offers these examples:

   

    “the new policy on dress code they handed out last week is our last chance 2 keep us out of uniforms. the new super intendant as u all know is from spartanburg is using the saturday school crap 2 take a note on how many offenses we have & will use it 2 make her decision. so we ned 2 stop breaking the dress code or we might have 2 really fight uniforms next year.”

   

    “dont worry abt us wearing uniforms nxt year. our parents wont buy them & the district cant even give us the first set cuz our parents pay the taxes & we cant afford them. so get ur parents opinion & make them disagress with uniforms!”

   

    Goli said that while examples like these demonstrate a problem, it is not one that can’t be solved.

   

    “I think that is where we come into play with Dictionary.com,” Goli said. “I have two kids at home. I see them using this technology, and I think there is a lot of value in leveraging that technology for educational purposes. Using these ‘cool’ technologies are great vehicles for teaching kids the proper ways to communicate.”

• Cell phone activities have become particularly onerous for those of us trying to educate our youth. Children no longer talk to each other, even if they are in the same room.  They text  message. One might naively think that texting isn’t so bad because at least children are expressing themselves in words and practicing their spelling, almost like letter writing.  Not so; quite the contrary!
   
   Children are using what used to be called inventive spelling. That is spelling words the way that they sound. For example, when students express dismay in text they write “OMG”.  This means Oh, my God! When they want to know where you are, they write “where r u?” This is a new language and one that cannot advance the cause of education for the 21st century.
   
   In addition to destroying the King’s English, today’s children are also not learning and enjoying social niceties like please, thank you, or it is a pleasure meeting you. They enjoy the anonymity of communicating through technology and tend to say things in text that they would never say face to face.
   
   This phenomena is not unique to our children. Adults are almost as guilty. They model this behavior by communicating with their children through text messaging.  Parents fail to have those crucial conversations with their children face to face; instead they think that their guidance is better received through the medium that children like to use.  Additionally, parents mistakenly believe that they are in better contact with their children when the children respond to their messages.  For example, “where r u?” And the child responds, “I am in school being tutored.”  Yeah, right!
   
   Try though we might to police the inappropriate use of cell phones in schools, it is almost impossible.  I have seen student’s texting in their pockets.  Our challenge in school, as well as at home, is not to fight technology because it is here to stay; but school personnel will play a critical role in channeling technology in the direction of quality teaching and learning.  Parents must insist that children understand the appropriate use of technology and the significant impact that poor judgment can cause.

• Reading for pleasure, which has declined among young people in recent decades, enhances thinking and engages the imagination in a way that visual media such as video games and television do not, Greenfield said.

   

  How much should schools use new media, versus older techniques such as reading and classroom discussion?

   

  "No one medium is good for everything," Greenfield said. "If we want to develop a variety of skills, we need a balanced media diet. Each medium has costs and benefits in terms of what skills each develops."

   

  Schools should make more effort to test students using visual media, she said, by asking them to prepare PowerPoint presentations, for example.

   

  "As students spend more time with visual media and less time with print, evaluation methods that include visual media will give a better picture of what they actually know," said Greenfield, who has been using films in her classes since the 1970s.

• "By using more visual media, students will process information better," she said. "However, most visual media are real-time media that do not allow time for reflection, analysis or imagination — those do not get developed by real-time media such as television or video games. Technology is not a panacea in education, because of the skills that are being lost.

   

  "Studies show that reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary," Greenfield said. "Reading for pleasure is the key to developing these skills. Students today have more visual literacy and less print literacy. Many students do not read for pleasure and have not for decades."

   

  Parents should encourage their children to read and should read to their young children, she said.

   

  Among the studies Greenfield analyzed was a classroom study showing that students who were given access to the Internet during class and were encouraged to use it during lectures did not process what the speaker said as well as students who did not have Internet access. When students were tested after class lectures, those who did not have Internet access performed better than those who did.

   

  "Wiring classrooms for Internet access does not enhance learning," Greenfield said.

   

  Another study Greenfield analyzed found that college students who watched "CNN Headline News" with just the news anchor on screen and without the "news crawl" across the bottom of the screen remembered significantly more facts from the televised broadcast than those who watched it with the distraction of the crawling text and with additional stock market and weather information on the screen.

   

  These and other studies show that multi-tasking "prevents people from getting a deeper understanding of information," Greenfield said.

• More than 85 percent of video games contain violence, one study found, and multiple studies of violent media games have shown that they can produce many negative effects, including aggressive behavior and desensitization to real-life violence, Greenfield said in summarizing the findings.

   

  In another study, video game skills were a better predictor of surgeons' success in performing laparoscopic surgery than actual laparoscopic surgery experience. In laparoscopic surgery, a surgeon makes a small incision in a patient and inserts a viewing tube with a small camera. The surgeon examines internal organs on a video monitor connected to the tube and can use the viewing tube to guide the surgery.

   

  "Video game skill predicted laparoscopic surgery skills," Greenfield said. "The best video game players made 47 percent fewer errors and performed 39 percent faster in laparoscopic tasks than the worst video game players."

   

  Visual intelligence has been rising globally for 50 years, Greenfield said. In 1942, people's visual performance, as measured by a visual intelligence test known as Raven's Progressive Matrices, went steadily down with age and declined substantially from age 25 to 65. By 1992, there was a much less significant age-related disparity in visual intelligence, Greenfield said.

   

  "In a 1992 study, visual IQ stayed almost flat from age 25 to 65," she said.

   

  Greenfield believes much of this change is related to our increased use of technology, as well as other factors, including increased levels of formal education, improved nutrition, smaller families and increased societal complexity.

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• Texting is fostering bad grammar and spelling, researchers claim

   

   Texting is causing a decline in standards of grammar and spelling in   teenagers, researchers have claimed.   

• Teenagers who frequently use 'techspeak' when they text performed poorly on a   grammar test, said Drew Cingel, a former undergraduate student in   communications at Penn State. 

   

   'Techspeak' inclusdes shortcuts, homophones and the ommission of non-essential   letters, such  

   

   When tweens write in techspeak, they often use shortcuts, such as homophones,   acronyms and omissions of non-essential letters such as 'wud' for 'would.' 

   

   But researchers say the texting is having a detrimental effect on normal rules   of grammar.  

   

   Mr Cingel gave middle school students in a central Pennsylvania school   district a grammar test and also asked them how often they sent text   messages.  

• "Overall, there is evidence of a decline in grammar scores based on the   number of adaptations in sent text messages, controlling for age and grade,"   said Mr Cingel.  

   

   Those who sent or recieved the most text performed the worst in the test.  

   

   "In other words, if you send your kid a lot of texts with word   adaptations, then he or she will probably imitate it," Sundar said.  

   

   "These adaptations could affect their off-line language skills that are   important to language development and grammar skills, as well."  

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• Johnson: Texting creates poor grammar habits

• A study published recently in the journal New Media & Society has confirmed what many English teachers have feared about students’ writing skills in this era of tweets, texts, emoticons and Facebook posts. Students who regularly send text messages tend to have low scores on grammar tests.

   

  The study, authored by Pennsylvania State University communications researcher S. Shyam Sundar and his colleague, Drew Cingel, found that sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders in Pennsylvania who used text adaptations for words had trouble with basic grammar, such as subject-verb agreement. There was a link between the number of text messages the students sent or received and the difficulty they had in selecting correct sentence structure.

   

  Sundar’s findings are sure to be discussed by middle and high school English instructors, as well as college professors, who are battling the adverse effects of truncated communication in their students’ writing assignments.

   

  I began to notice this problem textisms in my students’ essays during 2007, my ninth year of teaching English composition at the college level — and oddly enough, the first year I began texting on a frequent basis. When I pointed out the text abbreviations, such as “u” for “you” and “r” for “are” in their writing, my students admitted that texting was having a negative influence. When they saw the errors on paper they knew what was wrong, but their shortened-language habits had become ingrained.

• The hybrid language of texting presents a challenge like no other for today’s English teachers. I suspect that many of my older colleagues who have read Sundar’s findings long for the good old days of correcting improper usage of homophones such as “there” and “their,” as opposed to marking up “Gr8” for “great” or “H8” for “hate.”

   

  Now that smartphones are constant companions of adolescents, Twitter and text speak have produced a shorthand slang that has gone mainstream. This compounds the traditional grammar mistakes — dangling modifiers, run-on sentences, fragments, and comma splices — that have shown up in essays for years.

   

  As English teachers confront the difficulties texting presents, they will have to work much harder in helping their students master fundamental grammar. I have not gone into panic mode just yet, though.
• However, students must be able to make the transition to formal writing for success not only in school, but in the working world. Proper sentence structure and correct spelling are vital when it comes to applying for college and a job. One’s credibility and qualifications are seriously doubted when a college recruiter or an employer sees an abundance of grammar errors on applications. The bad grammar of middle schoolers evident from the tests Sundar administered shows that I and my fellow English instructors have a lot of work to do.

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• Writing Skills
   People know they’re using improper grammar when they text; it’s merely a shortcut that enables them to relay a message quickly and effectively. But over time, the way we communicate—even if we know the way we communicate is “technically” wrong—affects the way we think. The result is that people who have grown up texting may have much poorer writing skills than people who regularly communicate using grammatically correct sentences either in person, over the phone, or via e-mail. Even worse, they may lose their ability to modify their tone and style depending upon who they talk to. Many employers complain that entry-level hires have no idea how to send a business e-mail or communicate appropriately to superiors.
• Impatience and Instant Gratification
   Texting is real-time communication but is not in person. This creates an odd situation in which people must respond immediately but aren’t really participating in an ongoing, progressively deepening conversation. The instant gratification of texting can lead to incredible impatience, even aggression. But when people are in person, the requirement of communicating immediately can be daunting for people communicating primarily via text. Thus texting can inhibit both in-person communication and texting itself.
• Social Boundaries
   Unlike phone calls, there are no clear rules about when it’s acceptable to text. And because texting doesn’t result in an angry person answering on the other end, many people feel more comfortable texting at any time and in any circumstance. The result is a decrease in privacy and social boundaries. People may text in the middle of the night or while someone is on vacation and expect an immediate response because of the impatience texting encourages. The result is a blurring of the lines between public and private. While a couple might previously expect no interruptions on a vacation or honeymoon, they can now anticipate receiving and responding to texts. Because texting is not old enough for psychologists to know how this affects intimacy, we can only guess at its long-term effects on relationships.

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• The inception of the Information Age has placed digital literacy as one of the most recent, and perhaps biggest pedagogical paradigms in education.  Many believe students’ gaps in literacy can now be bridged through the use of technologies.  Students are required more than ever to obtain the competence and skills of digital literacy in order to keep up to date with the demands of an ever-growing and changing society.  That strain has percolated into the elementary education system, as students are required at an early age to be ready and proficient in the dynamics of information based systems, such as locating, organizing, understanding, assessing and producing information with the use of cell phones, Internet, personal digital assistants (P.D.A’s), other digital devices and computerized software. 

  On the other hand, other educators and theorists suggest that paper-base and pencil assessments, along with other traditional modes of literary are as efficient in terms student achievement, consolidated by studies and experiences.  They believe, regardless of the amount of interaction and time with digital devices, many readers and writers will continue to struggle because of the various socio-economic issues existing at home, like poverty, second language acquisition and psychological issues.  According to one study conducted by Higgins, Russel and Hoffman, literacy testing using both formats produced similar results with grade four students in eight Vermont schools.  However, a longitudinal study conducted in California, examined the effectiveness of a one to one laptop program on standardized testing.  They discovered that even moderate gains in literacy achievement using laptop technology could have an important long term effect.

• In broad terms, literacy is the ability to make and communicate meaning from  and by the use of a variety of socially contextual symbols. Within various  levels of developmental ability, a literate person can derive and convey  meaning, and use their knowledge to achieve a desired purpose or goal that  requires the use of language skills, be they spoken or written. A literate  person can mediate their world by deliberately and flexibly orchestrating  meaning from one linguistic knowledge base and apply or connect it to another  knowledge base. For example, knowing that letters symbolize sounds, and that  those sounds form words to which the reader can attach meaning, is an example of  the cognitive orchestration of knowledge, a literate person conducts. Literacy  is "not in isolated bits of knowledge but in students' growing ability to use  language and literacy in more and broader activities" (Moll, 1994, p. 202).The  definition of literacy is dynamic, evolving, and reflects the continual changes in our society.  Literacy has, for instance, expanded to include literacy  in information and communication technologies and critical literacy (Cunningham, 2000; Harste, 1994;  Leu, 2002; Mol1, 1994; Paris, Lipson & Wixson, 1994; Yopp & Singer, 1994).