WE SEE PRINT IN OUR EVERYDAY LIVES, we need print for our jobs, to look for groceries at the grocery store, or to read recipes from a cookbook.
It is how we make sense of the world to point us to what we need and where to go. We are fortunate to live in a society that allows everyone to learn how to read and write, and yet a large portion of Americans fall short.
According to the National Literacy Institute, as of 2024-25, 54 percent of U.S. adults read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level, and 64 percent of our country’s fourth graders do not read proficiently.
Something is missing here. Victoria Purcell–Gates, researcher and professor in the field of literacy education, recognizes a gap between the amount of print we see or do not see and the way we are taught to communicate. A culture of communication in a family unit is not necessarily the same as a cultural value of decoding print, which is essential to reading and writing. Decoding helps us understand prior experience and the way we refer to the context around us.
“Speaking goes with listening and writing goes with reading,” Purcell-Gates said in her book “Other People’s Words.” She wrote this book as a case study highlighting the problem of low literacy, especially among children from the nation’s poor population. Her case study reveals something that many children in America need today–the interwoven connection between literacy and how communication happens within family units.
Denny Taylor, a professor of literacy studies in the Teaching, Literacy and Leadership program at Hofstra University, studied children from highly literate families.
This research illustrates the experience of children growing up in families where “literacy is a part of the very fabric of family life.” She saw the correlation between how reading and writing were interwoven into virtually all the families’ activities, she said, “children learned of reading as one way of listening and of writing as one way of talking. Literacy gave them both status and identity within their community.”
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as the nation’s report card, reported that by 2019-2022, females expanded the achievement gap twice as much as males did. Male scoring dropped by two points, while female scoring dropped by four. Males dropped about five points in the 25th percentile and females dropped by six.
The NAEP reports that in 2012, 66 percent of 13-year-olds performed at or above level 300; the results showed an upward trend, with the highest long-term trend reading performance level, since 1971. In 2020, the results revealed a regression for 13-year-old students with 63 percent performing at or above level 300. The most recent results show a continued downward trend, with only 58 percent performing at or above the level 300, an all-time low since 1971.
The National Reading Panel simplifies the five main areas of focus that can guide educators, teachers and parents when introducing students to reading.
Phonics
The letter sound - relationships and the relationship with spelling patterns, pronunciation and decoding words.
Fluency
How well students can automatically read words out loud with accuracy, porosity and expression.
Phonemic awareness
Segmenting the phonemes within words and combining the individual sounds into words.
Vocabulary
Grasping and identifying words and their correlation with text.
Comprehension
Students’ ability to learn the meaning of words and understand what is being said.
In the digital world today, I found education.com, a fun, interactive and resourceful website for students, grades kindergarten through eighth grade, to learn more about phonetics, language, and other subjects.
A game found on education.com is Water Rafting: Antonyms, an interactive game found for sixth graders. I experienced an aha moment while playing the water rafting game, in having to distinguish between antonyms and synonyms.
The game came as a success, but for a sixth grader, it showed how kids learn to make meaning out of language. Being able to break down words and decipher the meaning of the word helps students become successful readers. It is easy to see and hear the word at times, but harder to comprehend the word and talk about it. That is the goal, to be able to decode words! ✲
