Florencia Ottonello

Early literacy: the key to fluency

By: Helen Abadzi.

Every September 8, on International Literacy Day, my memory goes to the illiterate women of my youth. Poverty and ethnic conflict in my native Greece were severe several decades ago, but they presented the same educational problems as today.

In the 1930s, when rural girls rarely went to school, two aunts in Athens hired a young woman. They were teachers and diligently taught her to read in the relatively consistent Greek orthography. Maria learned letters but never progressed beyond single words. Eventually she gave up. She watched over children who studied before her, but still died illiterate in her 90s. 

Ethnic conflict and displacement robbed my father’s sister of opportunity. The family fled from Turkey to Greece in 1922, her parents died, and she never went to school. She learned the reading basics in her 40s, from her daughter who was a teacher. She spent fifty years in a big city, surrounded by print.  But when I tested her at age 97, I found out that she could only read capital letters and very hesitantly.  At best, she puzzled out bus labels.

Very different was the performance of Sofia, who took care of me. Uprooted from Turkey in 1922, she attended first grade before becoming a homeless orphan. When I was learning to read, she was the one who helped me.  She read our textbooks haltingly, and we used to laugh.  But she could process entire sentences, so she kept practising, and improved.  In the last years of her life, she would put on her reading glasses, open the newspaper, and read the news to my mother.

Adult dyslexia

Decades later, as an education specialist at the World Bank, I appraised and evaluated adult literacy projects. (link is external) Governments and NGOs tried hard to teach adults in the 1980s and 1990s, but the cases reminded me of my childhood images. In Bangladesh, learners decoded letters laboriously, even after a year of practice. In Burkina Faso, adults who had completed courses read haltingly, and even had trouble reading their own handwriting.  By contrast, little-educated people who had learned in childhood, read fluently, like Sofia. The difference was striking.

It is not just unschooled adults who read laboriously. Educated foreigners learning languages that have unknown scripts experience the same difficulties. “Western” academics and aid workers who spend decades in Ethiopia or Bangladesh may speak the languages of those countries fluently, but perpetually read like mid-first graders. They report seeing a jumble of letters that must be decoded one by one.  Reading is thus too tedious, and many avoid it.

These events point to a striking phenomenon that could be. It seems to become significant by age 19 and probably affects all of us.  University students who must learn different scripts past the age of 18 typically read slowly, and for decades have difficulty scanning text. Several cognitive and neuroscientific studies show long-lasting reading difficulties for adults. Adult dyslexia may partly account for the very poor adult literacy programme outcomes worldwide. But it has gone unnoticed.  Educators typically attribute these failures to social issues, learner motivation, or organizational problems.  These are certainly important, but the results among those who persist are disappointing.  And since this strange dyslexia has remained invisible, little direct research has gone into it.

But what is effortless reading and why does it matter?  This competency seems like a commonplace rite of passage in childhood, but it requires specific changes in the brain. 

                                                                                                                  Source: UNESCO