I read, but I don’t understand: how to deal with functional illiteracy. The plague of the 21st century: functional illiteracy How libraries fight functional illiteracy

Let's talk about functional illiteracy? Let's start, perhaps, with an excerpt from a letter from a tenth-grader who prepared a review for the premiere of L. Buñuel's film “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972). Here's what it sounded like:

“The director is paid a lot of money just to explain everything to us, the audience. So that everything becomes clear to us, and not so that we ourselves guess everything... and how can we understand what the director meant? Maybe he didn’t mean anything by it, but you think for him... I’m tired of it. We got very smart"

People in the West began to think about functional illiteracy somewhere in the 80s of the last century. The problem was that, despite widespread literacy, people did not become smarter, but were increasingly unable to cope with their professional responsibilities. Several studies have shown that although people formally know how to read and write, they do not understand the meaning of the book or instructions they read, and cannot write a logically coherent text.

People suffering from functional illiteracy recognize words, but cannot decode language or find artistic meaning or technical benefit in it. That's why they are terrible readers and viewers - they prefer the crudest and most straightforward pop culture.

Some researchers believe that functional illiteracy is worse than even ordinary illiteracy, since it indicates deeper disturbances in the mechanisms of thinking, attention and memory. You can take a Nigerian black man, teach him scientific wisdom, and he will become a smart person. Because in his head all cognitive and mental processes proceed adequately.

The emergence of functional illiteracy in developed Western countries coincided with the first tangible steps of these countries towards the transition to an information society. Knowledge and talent to quickly navigate an unfamiliar environment have become criteria for an individual’s social growth. At MIT (as you remember, Gordon Freeman himself studied there), a graph of the market value of an employee was created depending on promotion on two scales. The first is solving routine, repetitive actions, reproduction, simple perseverance. And the second is the ability to perform complex operations that do not have a ready-made algorithm.

If a person is able to find new ways to solve a problem, if he can build a working model based on disparate data, then he is functionally literate. Accordingly, functionally illiterate people are adapted only to the work of cashiers and janitors, and then under supervision. They are unsuitable for heuristic activity.

In 1985, the United States prepared an analysis from which it turned out that from 23 to 30 million Americans are completely illiterate, and from 35 to 54 million are semi-literate - their reading and writing skills are much lower than what is necessary to “cope with responsibility of daily life."

In 2003, the proportion of US citizens whose reading and writing skills were below the minimum was 43%, or 121 million.

In Germany, according to education senator Sandra Scheeres, 7.5 million people (14% of the adult population) can be called semi-literate. There are 320,000 such people living in Berlin alone.

In 2006, the UK Department of Education reported that 47% of schoolchildren left school at 16 without achieving a basic level in mathematics, and 42% failed to achieve a basic level in English. British secondary schools send out 100,000 functionally illiterate graduates every year.

Laughed at the damned imperialists? Now let's laugh at ourselves. In 2003, similar statistics were collected from our schools (among 15-year-olds, I think). Thus, only 36% of schoolchildren had sufficient reading skills. Of these, 25% of students are able to perform only tasks of average complexity, for example, summarize information located in different parts of the text, relate the text to their life experience, and understand information given in implicit form. A high level of reading literacy: the ability to understand complex texts, critically evaluate the information presented, and formulate hypotheses and conclusions was demonstrated by only 2% of Russian students.

Functional illiteracy, of course, is formed not only in childhood. It can even overtake a fully grown person who has been swallowed up by the routine of a monotonous existence. Adults and old people lose reading and thinking skills if they do not need them in everyday life. After all, we also go through a million things at school and university. Let’s say I don’t remember chemistry at all, mathematics at the very least, it’s generally embarrassing to talk about history without Wikipedia at hand. Fortunately, I have not yet forgotten how to organize small simple words into giant pseudo-scientific texts.

We must admit that we live in a world of functionally illiterate people. I don't want to say that it was created by them, but in many ways it was created for them.

However, this is all boring. Let's better study functional illiteracy in practice, namely, identify its main properties and characteristics.

1) Functionally illiterate citizens avoid difficult tasks, are confident in advance of failure, have no motivation to take on more difficult tasks, and repeat the same systemic mistakes.

2) Such people often try to excuse themselves from any intellectual tasks, citing either a runny nose, or being busy, or being tired.

3) They honestly admit that they don’t like to read.

4) They ask other people to explain to them the meaning of the text or the algorithm of the task.

5) Attempts to read are associated with severe frustration and reluctance to do so. When reading, psychosomatic problems quickly arise: your eyes and head may hurt, and you immediately feel the desire to be distracted by something more important.

6) Our functionally illiterate readers often articulate with their lips or even voice what they read.

7) Have difficulty following any instructions: from shaping exercises to repairing a nuclear reactor.

8) Inability to organize and ask questions based on the material read. They cannot fully participate in discussions.

9) There is a very noticeable difference between what is understood by hearing and what is understood by reading.

10) They react to a problem caused by their own misunderstanding either with learned helplessness or by attacking others, since they do not fully understand who is right and who is wrong.

An additional complexity is that reading and writing skills are directly related to the ability to produce any information content. In fact, it is responsible for creativity in the network understanding of the term.

We must admit that we live in a world of functionally illiterate people. I don't want to say that it was created by them, but in many ways it was created for them. I see this literally in everything, everything strives for pristine, childlike simplicity and obsession. Advertising, Twitter of 140 letters, press level, literature level. Try offering someone a passage from Heidegger, Lacan, or Thomas Mann.

Only a small percentage of people are able to read, let alone write large, coherent analytical articles. I was surprised that this disease did not bypass the media sphere: well-written journalists are now worth their weight in gold and are quickly becoming editors. Simply because they have almost no competitors.

Degradation primarily affected all spheres of activity related in one way or another to the word. And if previously the mass was distinguished only by its bad taste, now even this rubbish must be shoved on a spoon in the form of chewed jelly without hard lumps.

By the way, the study Literacy in the Adult Client Population - Jones & Bartlett Publishers provided recommendations on how to write texts for functionally illiterate people, that is, for practically the entire B2C segment. Direct advice on copyright, since most advertising messages are formatted according to these laws. I will share with you:

1) They perceive abstract and impersonal texts much worse than direct appeals in the spirit of “Have you signed up to volunteer?” It is necessary to compose a targeted message, more imperative, more personalized. It is believed that this is the most important and effective rule for working with an illiterate audience. You agree, right?

2) You should use words from your everyday vocabulary, preferably no more than 3-4 syllables. There is no need for all these long compound words in the manner of the German language. We must avoid scientific words (they still won’t understand our discourse), technical and medical terms. It is advisable to avoid words that can be interpreted differently both in semantics and in connotation. You cannot use adverbs like “soon”, “rarely”, “often” - since it is important for such people to know how soon and how rarely.

3) Give abbreviations in full, “etc.” replace with the normal “and so on”, N.B. Don't write in the margins at all. Introductory words should also be excluded, although, of course, it’s a pity.

4) Break down information in the form of beautiful blocks. More paragraphs, no more text. Such people, as a rule, do not plan to decipher statistics and graphs with numbers in principle.

5) Sentences should not exceed 20 words. Headings should also be short and succinct.

6) Did you want to diversify your text with synonyms? Horseradish. For such readers, the appearance of new words only confuses them. And what you called “cars” at the beginning of the text should not suddenly become “cars.”

7) The most important information is placed in the lead of the article, at the very beginning, since there is a high risk that even if the reader gets to the end, his health and perception will no longer be the same.

8) The text must be diluted with generous spaces, pictures, callouts - all so that the reader is not scared off by the gloomy wall of solid text.

9) Be careful with pictures. There should be no decorative elements or illustrations that attract attention. By the way, in social advertising for such an audience it is recommended not to use, say, photographs of pregnant women smoking or drunken bruises lying under a bench. You need to show only what you want from the audience.

And if forty years ago scientists were looking for a way to combat functional illiteracy, now they are looking for ways to interact with it. The diagnosis has become so universal.

What are the causes of functional illiteracy? Here scientists disagree, but personally I am sure that this is due to the increased number of information flows that have befallen a person. The phenomenon of functional illiteracy began to take shape, relatively speaking, in the 60s and 70s, at the moment when television became color and widespread. A couple of years ago I read some good research from France, which stated that children from one to three years old who spent more than a few hours a day in front of the TV lost some of their cognitive functions.

I asked my friends, teachers and pediatricians, and they unanimously said that children born after 2000 all suffer from ADHD and cannot study, concentrate, or read. At the same time, there is an increase in social maladjustment. It is much more convenient and familiar for children to text each other online than to communicate in person. Japan has already developed a culture of gamers and hiccups who never leave their own room. This awaits us too.

I understand that it sounds somewhat outlandish that children at the same time do not know how to properly work with texts and vegetate on social networks, where everything is based on text. But look better at the level of their messages. Online content is generated by a few enthusiasts and a hundred or two commercial brands—the rest is pure reposting. It doesn’t matter what a person reposts: cats or a post about Baudrillard, this can equally indicate functional illiteracy. It’s not for nothing that the new generation was immediately nicknamed “killing cancer.”

Universal literacy has exposed the fact that schooling does not always produce competent people. However, it was only with the proliferation of new communication channels that the problem became impossible to ignore. And if forty years ago scientists were looking for a way to combat functional illiteracy, now they are looking for ways to interact with it. The diagnosis has become so universal.

I blame television, and then computerization, digital media. Radio is also a complicated thing. To listen to the news or Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chats,” you need to strain and concentrate. Television became the first source of information that did not require any effort in perception and analysis. The picture replaces the narrator's text, action, frequent changes of frames and scenery do not allow you to break away and get bored.

In those days when the network was created by geeks, the Internet was littered with clever texts. As the network popularized, people far from science and skilled labor came to it. Nowadays, most users need to know as many words as “porn” or “flashgames” to get what they want. You can instantly switch from horoscopes to news chronicles, from chronicles to jokes, and then to YouTube or Funny Farm. Almost like flipping channels on TV. Growing up, I had to spend some time and energy trying to entertain myself. The game more or less stimulated cognitive impulses.

“My children accuse my wife and me of being fascists who are too concerned with technology. They say none of their friends have similar restrictions in their family. This is because I see the dangers of over-indulgence in the Internet as well as anyone. I saw the problems I faced myself, and I don’t want my children to have the same problems.”

But these are people who, in theory, should idolize new technologies in all forms.

Advertising and SMM marketing departments need consumers. And who else can become a better consumer than a functionally illiterate person? These people may have a low income, but they are legion, and because of their low IQ, they are easily manipulated.

Let's be honest, society has not yet developed a certain information culture. On the contrary, everything is getting worse year after year as commercially oriented structures take over the information space. Advertising and SMM marketing departments need consumers. And who else can become a better consumer than a functionally illiterate person? These people may have a low income, but they are legion, and because of their low IQ, they are easily manipulated. For example, the vast majority of credit debtors are people who are not able to correctly read a bank agreement, figure out the order of payments and calculate their own budget.

Poverty begets poverty. Including in the intellectual sphere. I often see how young parents, in order to get rid of their child for at least half an hour, give him a tablet with games. And this is in one and a half to two years. Personally, I started playing and hanging out in front of the TV when I was five or six years old, but by that time I had already developed information self-defense techniques in my mind.

I knew how to filter out advertising garbage and be critical of any images on the screen. I could concentrate on reading one book for long hours. And early access to information flows that bring pleasure and relaxation leads to rapid degradation and atrophy of the synthetic functions of thinking.

Some people are becoming smarter, more and more dexterous in handling endless streams of information, while others are turning into dumb and debt-ridden cattle. And absolutely of his own free will. There is no one to even complain to.

There is no obvious connection between poverty and functional illiteracy. The influence and upbringing of parents is much more important. And also the presence of functional literacy themselves.

Remember old Lunacharsky? He may have discovered the best recipe against any kind of illiteracy. At one meeting, a worker asked Anatoly Vasilyevich:

- Comrade Lunacharsky, you are so smart. How many institutes do you need to graduate from to become like this?

“Only three,” he answered. “One should be completed by your grandfather, the second by your father, and the third by you.”

A mother and her 11-year-old son come to see a psychologist. He is a fairly physically developed boy and loves to play sports. Doctors do not find any mental development problems in him. However, he does poorly at school. Together with his mother, he reads paragraphs from the textbook aloud for several hours a day, but cannot answer questions about the content and does not understand the meaning of what he read.

In this particular case, it was determined that the child had functional illiteracy.

Functional illiteracy is commonly understood as the inability of a child or even an adult to use reading or writing in a social context. A functionally illiterate person, although able to read and write, cannot apply his skills in practice. For example, he cannot read, understand and use instructions for using household appliances, cannot fill out a receipt or other similar document, and is not able to write a statement with a request.

After a series of studies, it turned out that several tens of percent of people are functionally illiterate, according to some studies - up to 50%.

“Too much bookoff”?

A functionally illiterate person recognizes words when reading, but cannot find any artistic meaning or utilitarian benefit in the text that he read. Such people categorically do not like to read. Some researchers with medical education believe that functional illiteracy indicates more serious impairments in the mechanisms of attention and memory than those found in ordinary general illiteracy.

Today, the term “functional illiteracy” has begun to be interpreted much more broadly. It is more often understood as the degree of unpreparedness of a person to perform social functions.

Lack of preparation is manifested not only and not so much by insufficient understanding of what has been read. Here is the immaturity of speech skills: when perceiving someone else’s words, the meaning is either lost or distorted. One's own thoughts cannot be expressed clearly either. Here is the inability to perceive and accordingly apply in practice the rules of personal safety (a person does not understand the instructions for an electrical appliance, he may get an electric shock). Functional illiteracy also includes the inability to cope with information flows and insufficient computer literacy.

How serious is the situation?

A large-scale study concerning the functional illiteracy of Russian schoolchildren in grades 8-9 was conducted in 2003, and the results were very sad. Only a little more than a third of schoolchildren had sufficient reading skills to overcome this threshold. Of these, only about 25% could complete tasks of medium difficulty, such as oral and written summarization of information located in different places in the text.

Only 2% of those who took part in the study were able to formulate conclusions based on the text and propose their own hypotheses. Russia is no exception: the statistics for schoolchildren in Italy, Finland, England, and the USA are approximately the same.

Of course, in general, the level of functional illiteracy varies across cultures and countries. This is due to the fact that in a more developed society more advanced skills are required. Thus, a level of reading and comprehension of text that is sufficient for a rural area of ​​a developing country can be assessed as functional illiteracy in a technologically advanced metropolis.

The main signs of functional illiteracy of a schoolchild:

1. there is a clear dislike of reading;
2. avoidance of intellectual tasks of any kind, lack of motivation to solve them;
3. asking other people to explain a text or a method for solving a problem;
4. inability to follow simple instructions;
5. attempts to read cause physical difficulties in the form of headaches, eye pain, fatigue;
6. it is much easier to understand the material by ear than after reading the text independently;
7. While reading, children often try to articulate and even pronounce the text.

Causes of functional illiteracy

One of the most popular explanations is a sharp increase in information flows. There is no scientific evidence for this, but the increase in the number of functionally illiterate children did coincide with the development of television. There are a number of studies that prove that young children (1-3 years old), spending several hours every day in front of a TV screen, lost some cognitive skills.

However, the reason for this could simply be that no one is taking care of a child who sits in front of the TV for several hours a day?

There is no clear evidence of the “fault” of television and the Internet in the epidemic of functional illiteracy. But in any case, they take away the child’s time, which could be spent learning to read, write, and generally study.

It must be admitted that functional illiteracy and dyslexia were first described in the 19th century, long before the development of information technology. Then they tried to explain this by heredity and genetics. Today, the genetic factor cannot be discounted either.

Is it possible to fight?

They note that functional illiteracy is not a problem of pedagogical science, but the consequences of incorrect teaching in the primary grades of school. And the problem should be eliminated precisely there and precisely at the age of 6-8 years. To eliminate functional illiteracy, neither additional financial investments nor individual scientific developments are required. All that is required is to include functional literacy instruction in every lesson, be it reading, native language, or computer science. The methods are known, and mastering them is accessible to any modern teacher.

Functional reading is called the main means of combating functional illiteracy. This is reading to find data to solve a pre-formulated problem. Thus, in functional reading, scanning reading techniques are used (they are also called scanning techniques) and analytical reading. Analytical reading is a selection of quotes, development of diagrams and diagrams, highlighting key points in the text.

To help your child cope with the text:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit

1. Train his memory.
2. Teach him to expand his peripheral vision: he should see not just one line, but many.
3. Ask him not to pronounce the text.
4. Show him that there are different types of reading - introductory, educational, viewing.
5. Teach him to divide the text into parts, draw up a plan, and an outline of the content.
6. Master the translation of information from table form to text form with it
7. form and vice versa.
8. Teach him to look for answers to specific questions in the text.

In order to prevent, let alone overcome, functional illiteracy, you need to work hard. A child who has not achieved reading comprehension by age 10 may already be considered functionally illiterate, and this will be more difficult to catch up and overcome at an older age.

Functional illiteracy is the inability to read, write and do math at a level necessary to complete basic everyday tasks. Affordable secondary education should provide these skills to everyone - but in practice, up to a quarter of adults in developed countries cannot understand what is written on the box of medicine bought at the pharmacy. “Theories and Practices” decided to respond to the popularity of the phenomenon with expert opinion and asked researchers from the field of neurobiology and sociology about how functional illiteracy arises and whether it is a consequence of a worldwide conspiracy of marketers or a decrease in the level of intelligence due to the penetration of the Internet into all spheres of human life.

“Even a hundred years ago, before the advent of these technologies, most of the world’s population could neither read nor write.”

Yuri Shtyrov,

neurobiologist, professor, head. Magnetoencephalography Laboratory of Aarhus University (Denmark); senior researcher, head Laboratory of the Center for Neuroeconomics and Cognitive Research, National Research University Higher School of Economics

There appears to be no single physiological disorder underlying functional illiteracy. It can occur due to both visual problems and cognitive impairment. Language comprehension disorders range from a basic inability to comprehend letter combinations to problems with syntactic or pragmatic analysis. Sometimes a text is perceived incorrectly due to the fact that the brain simply cannot capture enough visual information to perceive the word. More often, however, they talk about violations of segmentation - the coherent analysis of textual information - when the translation of the visual code into a phonological one becomes impossible. In this case, we see the text, but the brain is unable to transfer the information contained in it for further analysis, activate memory traces of the words read, etc.

In the scientific literature, dyslexia is highlighted separately, which is considered a clinical and psychological problem and occurs quite often: depending on the diagnostic approach used and the age group, up to 15-20% of the population faces it. However, in 2-4% the problems can be quite serious. With dyslexia, the process of processing text as such is disrupted, although the rest of the brain systems outwardly work more or less fully, intelligence is developed, and oral speech is normal. Dyslexia is considered a developmental disorder, but can also occur as a comorbidity with other disorders.

Dyslexia is definitely often (but not always) the cause of functional illiteracy, although the degree of dyslexia can vary: some will never learn to read, while others (if they start studying in a special program in time) can make noticeable progress. The causes of dyslexia lie at the neurobiological level, but the specific mechanisms of this disorder are still unclear. Interestingly, how often it occurs depends on what language a person speaks, reads and writes. Text information in different languages ​​is processed differently by the brain, and some spelling systems are easier to process than others. For example, in Russian, written text more or less matches the sounds of spoken language, but French, English or Danish are much more complex, making it very difficult for children to learn to read. As a result, in countries with such languages, the number of people with text comprehension disorders is higher. At the opposite pole is, for example, the Finnish language, where almost every speech sound corresponds to a letter or pair of letters.

“There is a so-called critical age for language acquisition: already at the age of 6-7 years, the plasticity of the nervous system begins to decline”

In some cases, reading problems can be explained in terms of attention deficits. And some people simply didn’t really learn to read because they didn’t devote enough time to it. The Internet and TV can, of course, be blamed for a lot of it. But if they simply take away the child’s time, and he does not have time to learn to read, write and count, is it necessary to look for a medical explanation? I don't presume to say this. A hundred years ago, before the advent of these technologies, most of the world's population could neither read nor write. How many functionally illiterate people were there then, and what was the ratio of the causes of this condition? It is not known for certain. It is only known that dyslexia was observed even before the advent of modern information technologies - its first scientific description was made in the 19th century. At least part of the disorder is determined genetically.

The changes brought about by modern technology are the changes of the last decades. However, they do not occur on their own, but in the context of a general change in people's lives. It's not just that we watch more TV - we read less. Without practice, any skill disappears or does not develop. I think there are indirect effects of television and the Internet on reading competence, but I would not say that they are harmful to reading ability as such. Another thing is that on the Internet there is not always full-fledged feedback: here they write with errors, use a simplified style and colloquial vocabulary. Incorrect simplified forms are recorded and are no longer perceived as an error.

Unfortunately, in our case, not only the time in the day that can be devoted to literacy development is limited, but also the time of life. There is a so-called critical age for language acquisition: already at the age of 6-7 years, the plasticity of the nervous system begins to decline, and this affects the ability to develop cognitive skills - primarily, apparently, language skills. Like spoken language, reading is a very complex skill: essentially we associate a fairly random random combination of lines and circles with sounds, words and meaning, combine them all into sentences and try to understand the overall meaning of the text. Despite the apparent simplicity of this skill, reading requires a lot of effort from the brain, the coordinated work of many millions of neurons and neural networks in a variety of areas. If we miss the moment when the brain is most plastic, capable of creating new connections and building new representations for information, then it will be more difficult for it to do this in the future. That is why when a child is busy with cartoons or computer games instead of books, he is probably missing out on an opportunity that will later be difficult or even impossible to make up for.

“Illiteracy usually comes from the family”

Vera Chudinova,

Vice-President of the Russian Reading Association, Deputy Chairman of the research committee “Sociology of Childhood” of the Russian Society of Sociologists, Candidate of Pedagogical Sciences

Functional illiteracy - the inability to live in modern society - is, first of all, the inability to read, write and count well. Illiteracy is relevant to society because in order to learn and adequately adapt to life in a changing world (learn a new profession, for example), you need to be able to read. Also, over time, digital literacy was added to reading, writing and arithmetic: the ability to work on a computer and use information and combination networks. These are the basic skills now. However, the term itself - “functional illiteracy” - is constantly expanding. After all, living in modern society already requires economic, legal and other types of literacy.

Errors in the teaching process in terms of functional illiteracy do not play a big role: the issue is in the education system as a whole. Of course, there are teachers in schools whose children do better or worse than others, but this is not a question for them. In some countries - in Finland, for example - reading skills and abilities are specially adjusted so that schoolchildren can correct their shortcomings and begin to read well - and therefore begin to study. And for healthy adults, many countries have special training programs to improve reading and computer literacy. Literate people are able to think critically and select more accurate and reliable information from sources of various types, illiterate people are not.

“Literate people in Russia are more likely to remain unemployed”

Oleg Podolsky

Head of the “Learning Design and Competency Development” group at the Institute of Education, National Research University Higher School of Economics

In 2013, the results of the first PIAAC (Programme for the International Assessment for Adult Competencies) study on key competencies of the adult population were published. It was attended by both OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries and partner countries, including Russia. An international report from this study examines in detail the possible reasons for low literacy rates in different countries. The highest results in reading literacy are observed in Japan, Belgium, Finland, and the Netherlands. In these countries, in general, the achievements of adults according to the research results are high, and there are few people with a low level of functional literacy. There is a hypothesis that this is due to the high quality of school education, on the one hand, and the high level of social guarantees, on the other: many people have access to quality education. In these countries, a person's literacy level is weakly related to the education level of their parents. On the other hand, members of the public were indeed somewhat surprised that in such economically developed countries as the USA and Great Britain, about a third of the total adult population surveyed turned out to have low levels of functional literacy. Often these are people with an insufficient level of education and children of parents with a low level of education. Because in reality, not everyone has access to quality education.

In Russia, an average (compared to OECD countries) level of reading literacy among adults was found, while the spread of results is small: there are few people with an extremely low level of literacy, but there are also few with a high level of literacy. As the classic wrote, “we all learned a little, something and somehow...”, and this, apparently, is just enough to demonstrate average results.

The results of the international study were not directly aimed at finding out who is smarter: managers or their subordinates, but they managed to identify some interesting facts. The results show that in Russia managers are more literate than workers, and more literate than specialists with higher education. Not much, but still. So we can sleep peacefully: our bosses are people who are, in a certain sense, “literate.” In other countries (for example, in the Czech Republic, in the UK) there was a tendency that some specialists with higher education are still more literate than managers. As we know, good specialists may well earn more than their managers.

However, literate people in Russia are more likely to be unemployed than the OECD average. But this is probably more a question of the capabilities of the labor market, which should attract and use the national potential, skills and competencies of the adult population in the right direction.

“People with higher levels of reading literacy are more successful at solving so-called problems in technology-rich environments.”

The highest level of competence in Russia today is demonstrated by people aged 45-49, and if we talk about the results of the study, then there are a variety of possible reasons. The simplest is the features of the PIAAC study sample. It is representative of the country as a whole, but there was no goal to make each age cohort representative (for example, every five-year period from 16 to 65, in order to then compare people of different ages). At the same time, given that this picture is typical only for our country and also, for example, for Slovakia (in other countries, the highest level of competence was observed on average among people 30-35 years old), there is an assumption that people who at the time Researchers were 45-49 years old and received the highest quality education during the Soviet years. But, again, this hypothesis requires serious testing.

Of course, there are ways to reduce the level of functional illiteracy. Many countries have programs to improve adult literacy: various continuing education and development programs, advanced training courses. Many of them are built in an informal manner. Entire systems for maintaining the required level of adult literacy, operating in Canada, Great Britain and other countries where these issues are given due attention, have already proven their effectiveness.

The question of whether excessive exposure to computers and television has an impact on the development of low reading and mathematics competencies cannot be answered unequivocally. Large-scale studies of adult literacy were not carried out when people did not yet have televisions in their homes, and even less so, computers. In addition, it is important to understand what “excessive passion for computers” means - if we are talking about using a computer to solve professional problems, then the situation is rather the opposite: today, in principle, you cannot do without a certain level of reading literacy and mathematical literacy, and to work with they are key to the computer. A similar connection was found in the study: people with higher levels of reading literacy are more successful in solving so-called problems in a technologically rich environment. If we are talking about how reading literacy is affected by excessive television watching, the use of the Internet and computer games, then it is difficult to draw any comprehensive conclusions. It makes sense to conduct a separate study and find out how, for example, how much time per day an adult plays online games or watches comedy series is related to reading literacy. Then it will be possible to answer this question more accurately.

Does illiteracy cause tangible, tangible damage, or is the harm from it limited to grade marks and children's tears shed over lined notebooks? The author of the article tells how speech errors spoil not only our language, but also our lives.

Illiteracy costs money

My husband never buys meat if he sees that the price tag hanging next to a piece of pork says: carbonate.

Would you say that this is inappropriate pickiness? Not at all, there is a deep calculation in such behavior. A carbonate is a salt of carbonic acid, and a baked piece of pork fillet is a carbonate. If the seller is confused about the names, it means he does not understand what he is selling. Why would a buyer take a risk by contacting such a seller?

For example, the word turns me off from any product or service activity(in Russian noun activity does not form a plural form; activity- this is a tracing paper from English). And I’m sure that every person has their own list of ugly words that become the reason for refusing a purchase. It’s a pity that the seller doesn’t know about this or doesn’t want to know, stubbornly not seeing any sin in mistakes.

The higher the level of education of your target audience, the more likely it is that speech errors will be fatal to your sales - buyers will turn away from you.

Losing face

Society pays great attention to how public figures speak. Sometimes this attention becomes an unpleasant surprise for a person, especially if she is careless about the quality of her speech.

And then illiteracy, which a person had not noticed before and which supposedly did not bother him before, becomes the cause of public distrust and complete, as the Japanese say, loss of face.

This conclusion can be illustrated by the speech of the former governor of the Lipetsk region, which recently spread throughout the Internet in a couple of days. A high-ranking official tried to speak out about raising the retirement age, but literally could not connect two words (he mixed up the cases and distorted the grammar) that his idea, whatever it was initially, was never revealed to the audience.

People who watched this speech, of course, enthusiastically discussed the “eloquence” of the governor. But they also asked a more unpleasant question: how could such a person occupy such a high position? This turn of public opinion turned out to be the price to pay for tongue-tiedness.

One of the expressive signs of a low level of language proficiency is inability to differentiate speech styles. If someone talks to alcoholics in the same way as with academics, and with academics in the same way as with alcoholics, then his communication is at least ineffective. But if this someone is, in principle, unable to switch between styles, then sooner or later he will be disgraced

Thus, thanks to the Internet, the speech of the chairman of the culture committee (!) of the Legislative Assembly of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, in which the deputy invited her colleague to “keep an eye on the market,” became widely known. The official's criminal language caused a scandal, and this striking example only highlights what has become commonplace: in business communication, slang expressions and colloquialisms are often used, although both are beyond the bounds of literary language.

Of course, the linguistic “risk group” is not only government officials, but any public figures. So, with the development of online education, we have many teachers of different disciplines. Alas, if in pursuit of popularity these people are concerned with What they say they are not very interested in the question, How they say. But for the listener, the second is much more important than the first! And a single incorrectly placed emphasis can nullify the entire authority of the teacher.

Accents are not so bad; if you set yourself a goal, then they are not so difficult to correct; But the ubiquitous office staff is a real disaster. A clumsy bureaucratic language with many verbal nouns is the same sign of illiterate speech as spelling and punctuation errors. What is the first thing that is bad about clerical work? Because it is impossible to understand the speaker. And if you stuff your speech with foreign borrowings...

I remember one young online teacher trying to explain what a cover photo is on a Facebook page. “The cover is such a big visual slot,” is what he literally said. This is not even pidgin Russian, this is complete speech helplessness that can forever scare away those who want to learn.

Where do they give competent speech?

Usually at school. But not all students easily master Russian literacy, so they often become victims and peddlers of a dangerous illusion, clothed in something like the following words: “I’ll finish school, go to economics ( physico-mathematical, legal and so on), and no more spelling!

When it turns out that literate Russian is needed throughout adult life (who would have thought?), a new argument is used: “I’m not a philologist and I don’t have to write and speak correctly!”

Alas, whether you are a philologist or not, your mistakes, awkwardness of speech, incorrect constructions will still be noticed by others, so it’s better not to start ridiculous conversations about the fact that you didn’t study at the philology department.

Or maybe it's a disease?

Since the terms began to be widely used in Russia dyslexia And dysgraphia, many schoolchildren (and adults too) breathed a sigh of relief. Now you are not a blockhead who spells the word cow with an Y, but a patient, and you have a disease with a beautiful name.

Reassuring articles report how many successful people in the world suffer from dyslexia - including, for example, Steven Spielberg. But, let's be honest, it wasn't dyslexia that made Steven Spielberg a famous director. It is much more likely that the inability to read and write normally seriously hindered him, and if in terms of overcoming his shortcomings any celebrity with dyslexia could become an excellent motivating example, then relying on the shortcomings themselves is at least strange

Don't let yourself be fascinated by pretty names. It is not so important why you write with errors and read syllable by syllable. Another thing is important: what to do about it now?

How to improve your literacy?

Read a lot. Not once a week, but every day. When we read, we remember the visual image of the word and become more literate, even if we don’t know the rules. You may not be able to explain why it is written to do and not to create, but the only correct form of the word is now imprinted in your memory, and you will not make mistakes.

Give preference to classical literature. It will correct your style, enrich your vocabulary, and give you an idea of ​​the appropriateness of different words and constructions in different situations.

Write dictations. Ask your loved ones to regularly dictate texts to you, preferably classical ones. Many weaknesses in your writing will instantly be revealed, and you will at least understand what you need to work on.

Find a good philologist who will teach you Russian. With a mentor, it is easier, firstly, to correctly formulate the problem, and secondly, to solve it effectively.

Ultimately, if there are no such specialists in your environment, or if your social position prevents you from openly seeking such a mentor, find communities on the Internet dedicated to correct speech. Reading short educational materials in such communities may not solve all your literacy problems, but at least point you in the right direction towards solving them.