What is Literacy?

Literacy is much more than knowing the alphabet and being able to read a few words or sentences. It is important to understand the meaning of the words and ideas we read and the context in which they are used. Being literate means that people are able to handle the words, sentences and ideas they need to read every day. It allows people to take the information they have read and apply it for their own purposes.

There is no magic dividing line between people who are literate and those who are not. According to a 1990 Statistics Canada survey on literacy, just about every Canadian who can speak English or French is able to read and write some things in one of our official languages. And new Canadians or Native Canadians who may not be able to read or write in English or French may none the less be highly literate in the language they learned as a child and in which they have studied and worked.

Beyond the ability to read and understand materials, literacy enables people to learn new things, such as new technologies. With workplaces changing daily, people need to be able to learn to use new cash registers, computers and computer- controlled robots and machinery, for example. Good reading and comprehension skills are essential for us to handle the training programs for these technological tools.

Literacy is a basic need in our world. Without an ability to read and write well, people suffer poorer health, unemployment and poverty. The numbers that follow tell the story.

Literacy Facts and Stats

More than one in three Canadians have reading skills that aren't adequate to read and use the written materials they come across every day. According to a 1990 survey:

The 1990 Statistics Canada literacy survey found that:

• 7 per cent of Canadians cannot read;
• 9 per cent can only read simple words;
• 22 per cent can read simple sentences;
• 62 per cent have adequate reading skills.

A survey of Canadians' reading skills conducted by Southam News in 1987 found that large numbers of Canadians cannot handle basic reading tasks.

Literacy and Poverty

Literacy is a close cousin of poverty in Canada. It can keep people from finding good paying jobs or any job at all. With a low family income, people tend to have poorer health. Their children often face unfair disadvantages in coping with others' attitudes or with schools and other systems that assume all of us have enough money to do what they expect us to do.

In 1986, Statistics Canada found that three out of five people with less than a grade 9 education were out of the labour force. People with low literacy skills may give up hope of finding a job and stop looking for work.

The children of poor parents are often labelled in school. Their teachers may have low expectations for their performance which the children then fulfill. When neither the children's parents nor the school are able to help them, the children may simply drop out before they have learned adequate reading skills.

In Ontario, the Ontario Literacy Coalition found that the drop out rate for children from poor families was double the average drop out rate and that three out of four poor adults had not completed high school.

Adults with low incomes are more likely to have disabilities. The children of poor families have more health problems than other children.

The 1987 Southam Survey of Canadians' literacy skills found that Quebeckers, like many others, don't see literacy skills as important or relevant to their lives. Almost 90 per cent said that they had never felt penalized because of problems with their reading and writing skills. Three years later, the Statistics Canada survey found that more than 40 per cent of Quebeckers had reading skills that were inadequate for everyday life.

A 1981 report for western Canada and the 1987 Southam Survey found that only two per cent of people who might benefit from literacy programs actually take such training. When poverty and literacy are problems, the lack of child care services, the cost and time needed for travel to literacy courses and the long hours that people may need to work to earn enough money for the essentials of life, may all prevent low literate adults from taking literacy training.

It can take years to learn to read, depending on how good a person's skills are at the outset of literacy training. Perhaps that is why so few people who could benefit from the training actually register in programs. It may be easier to say that one wants to improve one's skills than it is to actually sign up for a program that may not show results for some time.

It is important to be straightforward about a person's training program when encouraging them to improve their skills. A literacy instructor can make a realistic assessment of how long the individual's literacy training program may have to be, based on the level of skills the person has and the amount of timethe person is able to commit to literacy training.

If the volunteers and staff of community agencies, who each day see many of the Canadians who cannot read and write well, can encourage even a few people to improve their literacy skills, the horrifying statistics on illiteracy in Canada may slowly improve.