International Literacy Day

What the day is

International Literacy Day is observed on September 8. UNESCO proclaimed the date in 1966, and the first official observance followed in 1967.

Origin and background

Global adult literacy has risen enormously over the past century and still leaves hundreds of millions of adults unable to read a simple sentence. About two thirds of them are women, a ratio that has proved stubborn, and the strongest predictor of whether a child becomes literate is frequently whether their mother is.

Basic literacy is also not the whole target. Functional literacy, meaning the ability to read a tenancy agreement, a dosage label or a benefits form and act correctly on it, is far more common a gap and is widespread in wealthy countries whose headline literacy figures look excellent.

How reading should be taught produced one of the longest and most bitter arguments in education. One tradition held that children learn to read largely by exposure to good books, guessing unfamiliar words from context and pictures. The other held that the relationship between letters and sounds has to be taught directly and systematically, because writing is a code and the code is not obvious.

The evidence has come down clearly on the side of explicit, systematic phonics instruction for decoding. Reviews of the research through the last quarter century supported it, and a number of widely sold reading programs built on the guessing approach have since been withdrawn or rewritten after districts found children had been taught strategies that stopped working once the pictures disappeared. Decoding is not the whole of reading, and comprehension needs background knowledge and vocabulary, but nobody comprehends what they cannot decode.

How to take part

• Read to a child. Twenty minutes is more effective than almost anything else available to a parent.
• Volunteer with an adult literacy program, which is chronically short of tutors.
• Support your public library, which is the delivery mechanism in most communities.
• Check that a school's reading program teaches phonics explicitly.
• Write plainly at work. A great deal of functional illiteracy is really badly written forms.