Jeanelle Driver's List: 2.4 Team B Negative

• ***Only a little more than half of the students in today’s U.S. elementary schools learn to read and write well enough to be functionally literate.
  ***More than 40% of the employees in U.S. businesses are functionally illiterate.
  ***More than 94 million adults in the U.S. can speak, but not read, the English language.
  Source: Literacy in the Labor Force Report, 2003. http://literacy-research.com/

   

   

• As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.
• At least since the invention of television, critics have warned that electronic media would destroy reading. What is different now, some literacy experts say, is that spending time on the Web, whether it is looking up something on Google or even britneyspears.org, entails some engagement with text.
• Young people “aren’t as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line,” said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University

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• 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.

• One thing that I know for sure about how texting affects social standards is that the texting “language” can become permanently stored within our brains, and cause us to write the way we text. Now, I haven’t studied my share of psychology and sociology, but this idea can be strongly supported by just looking in the dictionary. For example, texting “language” has become such a part of our society that even “lol” has been added to the English Oxford Dictionary.
• “Today’s cell phones allow users to surf the web, conduct text chats with others, take photos, record video, download and listen to music, play games, update blogs, send instant text messages, keep a calendar and to-do list, and much more.” This is so true because people take advantage of the freedoms that come along with new technology. Today’s technology distracts people from their responsibilities and causes them to sit at home all day, rather than hang-out with friends. Instead of talking to someone that is in the same room, teenagers would rather text or send an instant message; this idea does nothing but lower social standards.
• “Some educators and researchers believe that this is because textisms are phonetically based: This phonological awareness has long been associated with good reading skills along with exposure to the written word in any form is also linked to improved literacy.”

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• TV conditions a child to dual   stimuli: sound and images.

   
• The persistence of TV sound   and rapidly-changing images can condition a child to expect that level   of stimulation in other circumstances, notably school. But there, a child   will be called upon to speak, to listen to a teacher, work some problems,   or read, non
• A child must learn to move   the eyes back and forth across the page in order to read. But with television,   the eyes fix on the screen. One hour a day in school learning to move   the eyes back and forth cannot compete with four or more hours with the   eyes fixed on a TV screen.

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• Fifteen million copies today! More surprisingly, Common Sense by Thomas Paine sold this equivalent in just three months. In its first year, it sold 500,000 copies, or 20% of the colonial population.