Ending the National Scandal of our 20% Illiteracy Rate.

Illiteracy is almost unknown in Finland because there are no exceptional sound correspondences in their written language. UK children master the sound correspondences just as quickly as Finnish children but then they also have to learn that ‘ton’ reads as ‘tun’ and ‘weigh’ as ‘way’ and ‘walk’ and ‘wok’ and so on through a total of 3750 ‘special cases’ all of which have to learned individually.

Most children succeed in learning these 3750 ‘special cases’ intuitively, during subsequent successful reading experience. Unfortunately, about 20% cannot so readily absorb this avalanche of ‘special cases’ and conventional teaching strategies are not able to deliver the quantity of successful reading sessions, necessary to secure their internalisation. For them, reading is a consistently confusing pattern of hesitations and contextual guesses which only serves to erode their self-confidence and makes assimilating the ‘special cases’ an even more distant prospect.

At the extremes of the literacy debate, a view has gained currency in the past five years or so that all of these ‘special cases’ can be learned by all children assimilating a fixed set of ‘rules’ in nursery and infant classes. The large numbers of head teachers who have succumbed to pressure to follow this unproven, logic-defying theory in the past five years have inevitably been finding that the normal distribution factor still applies and that .tests at 11 years of age are still confirming that this illogical philosophy continues to condemn one fifth of all children to a lifetime of illiteracy.

We will make no progress towards achieving Scandinavian levels of literacy in the United Kingdom and other English speaking countries until we accept the reality that our written language embodies so many complex sound correspondences that its assimilation will always be a lengthier process for many, otherwise, intellectually unimpaired children. We must adopt teaching strategies which will ensure that these children are not subjected to the confusing experience of hesitations and contextual guessing which currently pass for ‘reading sessions’ and which inevitably achieve nothing other than the destruction of their chances of becoming literate adults.

Q.E.D.