Literacy

Literacy is a right to which every Australian child is entitled, so it’s pertinent to consider on International Literacy Day (today, September 8) why some Australian students are still failing to achieve a minimum standard of literacy.

A comparison of Australia’s performance against other OECD countries would appear to demonstrate that Australian students are on the whole performing well at school. However, a closer look reveals students from low-income families are tending to fall behind their peers.

A higher proportion of socio-economically disadvantaged students in Australia are failing to achieve minimum standards in reading, writing, spelling and grammar, with the result that by 15 years of age Australian students from the lowest socioeconomic group in Australia are in general performing almost three years below that of students from the highest socio-economic group in reading.

Continue reading "Writing the wrongs of literacy in Australia" »

Type the words “Steve Fielding” and “idiot” into Google and you get 14,300 hits. Many of these entries came in the past few days, most of them on blog sites, many of which have one author and as many readers, as the nation’s smarty-pants pundits seized on Fielding’s “fiskal” fiasco as proof that the guy is as dumb as a box of rocks.

Now I’m not going to pretend that my reaction upon seeing the footage of his doorstop spelling bee wasn’t one of unbridled hilarity. I almost spat my coffee out.

And when I’d regained my composure, I called my workmates over to ask if they too had seen the Family First Senator blundering his way through a doorstop where, after referring three times to “physical” policy instead of “fiscal”, he insisted he knew what he was talking about by offering to spell the word.

Continue reading "Please explain this elitist insecurity over language" »

If you are reading this piece you’re probably not among the close to half of the population with literacy and numeracy skills below the required levels to meet the demands of everyday life and work.

This figure comes from the Adult Literacy and Lifeskills survey undertaken by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2006 and while not up-to-the-minute, is worth reflecting on in light of last week’s National Literacy and Numeracy Week.

Specifically the survey revealed that between 46% and 70% of adults in Australia had poor or very poor skills across one or more of the five skill domains of prose literacy, document literacy, numeracy, problem-solving and health literacy.

Continue reading "Almost half of Australians have problems with literacy" »