Jury still out on what determines functional illiteracy

A 25-member panel of representative Canadians decided which reading tasks ordinary adults should be able to answer correctly just to get by in today's society.

Are you a functional illiterate? You probably are if you can't:

• Read and understand the right dosage from an ordinary bottle of cough syrup (10 per cent of adult Canadians can't);
• From six road signs, pick out which one warns of a traffic light ahead (13 per cent can't);
• Figure out the change from $3 if you ordered a soup and sandwich (33 per cent can't);
• Sign your name in the correct spot on a social insurance card (11 per cent can't);
• Circle the expiry date on a driver's licence (SIX per cent can't);
• Answer four questions about a meeting arrangement, including the date, time and people involved (between 15 and 17 per cent can't);
• Circle the long distance charges on a telephone bill (29 per cent can't).

These are the 10 items that a Southam literacy "jury" agreed every Canadian should be able to answer correctly just to get by in today's society.

The jury—drawn from across the country and from all walks of life—overwhelmingly chose these 10 as the most fundamental to daily life of the 38 items on one version of the Southam literacy test. In addition to the two dozen individuals named at the end of this article, literacy students in Saint John, NB., also passed collective judgment and were counted as one vote.

Twenty of the 25 jurors agreed these items described a minimal level of functional literacy that they found acceptable. The jurors gave their opinions independently after looking at both the literacy questions and what answers counted as correct.

"Although we could have insisted that people get all 10 correct to be considered literate by the jury's standards, we decided to be more lenient," explains Dr. Paul Nesbitt of The

Creative Research Group which supervised the survey.

"If you get three or more of those key 10 items wrong, then you're functionally illiterate; if you get only two wrong—that's only eight right—then you're marginal, but still literate," says Nesbitt.

Creative Research also assigned another cut-off point for anyone who got eight or more wrong out of the 10. They're called basic illiterates.

In the technical report by Creative Research, basic and functional illiterates are combined as "illiterates" and marginal and full literates are together called "literates".

In fact, the literacy jurors wanted a much higher level of minimal functional literacy, on average demanding 64 per cent correct out of the 38 items. This standard would have meant that 37 per cent of Canadian adults were functionally illiterate.

Asked about a "desirable" level of literacy, the jurors said Canadians should correctly answer all but a few of the 38 items.

Using the jury was a Canadian innovation in the "real-life" measurement of literacy, an approach pioneered in the United States in 1973 and since copied in Australia and Britain.

"We measure how well people read, write and handle numbers using examples from daily life, rather than slabs of schoolbook text," says Nesbitt.

Measuring literacy has always been controversial because no one agrees on the definition. Governments didn't start trying to come up with a uniform definition until after the Second World War, at least 5,000 years after reading and writing first appeared.

In 1948, a United Nations commission proposed "the ability to read and write a simple message" as a working definition of literacy. The UN and scores of experts have been trying to agree on a definition ever since, without success. Conferences of the erudite International Reading Association degenerate into brawls when academics champion their favored definition.