THE PROBLEM OF ILLITERACY

To appreciate the importance of communicating to illiterate populations, the state of illiteracy should be understood. This chapter describes the international, Canadian and New Brunswick levels, and the level of illiteracy of the target population in the project described in the case presented in this dissertation.

An important definition must first be made here. The term "illiteracy" is not used by many in the field of literacy, as it is often used to describe a large group within which various literacy skill levels exist. However, for the purposes of this dissertation, the term will be used to describe those to whom it would be applied to by people outside the field of literacy. The 1994 International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) of seven countries, the most comprehensive international study of literacy rates ever completed, used a scale of one to five. For the purposes of this dissertation, the first two levels of that scale will be termed "illiterate." These two levels are typified by people who have "serious difficulty dealing with printed materials" and those who "can only deal with material that is simple and clearly laid out" (Highlights, 1995).

The 1994 International Adult Literacy Survey, co-ordinated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), was the first multi-country and multi-language assessment of adult literacy. The survey was conducted in eight industrialised countries: Canada, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States. It provides the most comprehensive view of the state of illiteracy ever (Literacy, Economy...1995).

The survey developed three categories of literacy to reflect that people in industrialised countries face many different types of written material and require different skills to understand and use the information. The three categories are prose literacy, document literacy and quantitative literacy. As mentioned above, a scale of one to five was applied in each category.

As written earlier, this dissertation will group the first two levels of the IALS scale into the "illiterate" group. According to the IALS, for Germany by example, this includes 48.6% of the population in the prose category, 41.7% of the population in the document category and 33.3% in the quantitative category. By contrast, Poland had 77.1 % total of its population in the first two levels of the prose category, 76.1% in the document category and 69.2% in the quantitative category.