[SENco-forum] Re Literacy

One of the first texts I was required to read at college - in those halcyon 
60s days was How to Lie with Statistics.

The message given to us then was that any person should be able to abstract 
what they need from statistics in order to prove their point.  From what I 
see he papers each day, I can see that the DFES  is expert in abstracting 
any figures from statistics to prove the point they wish to make.

If you wish to look at the literacy levels of the population you can do 
worse than look at the reading age of the daily newspapers.  The last time I 
investigated these figures the levels were The Sun, The Mirror and the Star 
equalled around the eight-year-old level.  The Express and the Mail were 
around the 12-year-old level and The Scotsman was top of the list with a 
required reading age of 16 plus.

I wish and that publishers of textbooks would put the reading age required 
to deal with the text as part of the blurb we have and we are choosing 
textbooks.

My figures, not from years of research but from years of looking at my 
school statistics, and trying to match them with staff comments and student 
performance meant that I monitored student reading ages very carefully until 
they reached a level of about 13.5.  Once they reach that level it was 
rather like marathon training, you improve on your performance by actually 
reading regularly of something at the appropriate level that will extend 
your reading.  The same rule of thumb applied to those who were really 
non-readers of the secondary level.  You slogged like mad to get them to the 
level of around 10.5.  I then tended to use textbooks to develop reading 
skills and did an awful lot of work with subject specific vocabulary in 
order to get the moving at that level.

And apropos of nothing, I do hope that someone at the DFES has made a New 
Year resolution that learning in schools should be fun!

Regards

Ruth