September 13, 2004
UK Reading Standards
An article on the BBC website about the complexity of diabetic health advice left me feeling rather shocked last week because of the following conclusion from a scientist:
“He found people would need a reading ability of an educated 11 to 17-year-old to understand the sites.
However, he said the average reading age of people in the UK was equivalent to an educated nine-year-old.”
An average nine-year-old!!! How can that be? The percentage of O-level GCSE and A-level passes seems to increase every year - surely there must be some mistake!?!?
If research is indicating that the current literacy levels in the UK are as low as that, I think that kids are going to have to be ‘encouraged’ to read more books again. I realise that this makes me sound like some sort of Daily Mail-reading old fogey, but surely it’s no coincidence that the ‘txt msg’ is so popular, that television is made up almost entirely of awful, mind-numbing programmes, and that popular newspapers and magazines consist of predominantly large images and very little textual content.
