Read and Spell Blog

Functional illiteracy is different from illiteracy. Adults who are functionally illiterate have some reading and writing ability, whereas a person who is illiterate has never been taught how to read or write. Thanks to government regulations that make school attendance mandatory, there are fewer illiterate people today compared to in past centuries. However, functional illiteracy is more common than you might think.

Some estimates suggest that 1 in 7 people in the United States and the United Kingdom struggles with literacy skills. Functional illiteracy is defined by the extent to which difficulties with reading and writing prevent an adult from serving as a functioning member of society.

Literacy skills are the key to graduating high school, getting a job, pursuing further education, accessing job training and advancing in your career. You also need to be able to read and write in order to use a computer, send emails and text messages to friends and family, engage on social media, and navigate the web.

Learning disabilities are neurological differences in the way the human brain processes, stores and communicates information. Some estimates suggest that over 10% of the world’s population is affected by a learning disability such as dyslexia, dysgraphia and/or dyscalculia. These conditions can also co-present with processing disorders, attention difficulties (ADHD) and/or a fine motor skills disorder like dyspraxia. In extreme cases, they can cause individuals to miss out on literacy and math skills development, particularly when schools do not recognize the symptoms early on.

For adults, having an undiagnosed learning disability can affect career choice, limit job advancement and lead to a number of psychological and emotional issues, including depression and feelings of low self-worth. This is particularly true when the person interprets his or her past educational failures as personal faults and experiences feelings of embarrassment and shame because of a perceived intellectual deficiency.

The tragedy is that with the right diagnosis, coping strategies and accommodations can be put in place to help every individual with a learning disability achieve their full potential.

People with dyslexia have many strengths thanks to the unique ways in which their brains process stimuli, including language. For example, many individuals with dyslexia are right-brain dominant. The right and left hemispheres of the brain are organized in a slightly different way. On the right, cells are more evenly distributed (versus in clusters). This means connections have to cross larger distances, which helps dyslexics with big-picture thinking, spotting patterns, and taking a more open and creative approach to problem-solving.

Dyslexics are often holistic rather than linear thinkers. While memorizing facts may not be their strong suit, children and adults with dyslexia often have the ability to integrate personal experiences with acquired knowledge, to generate new ideas. They can make great team players and be extremely creative students who are artistically gifted and have an intuitive sense of spatial organization. That's because visual thinking and spatial reasoning are both associated with right-brain thinking.

For a significant number of children and adults, developing strong literacy skills requires overcoming the challenges posed by specific learning differences, such as dyslexia. Dyslexia affects reading, writing and spelling abilities but can also cause individuals to suffer from low self-esteem and lack confidence in the classroom.

While it is something people have for life, technology and strategy use can make language-based activities easier. For example, typing on a computer gives children and adults access to spell-checkers and helpful text-to-speech tools.

Mnemonic devices aid with learning the spelling of hard words. Memorizing high frequency vocabulary reduces the cognitive load involved in reading. Additionally, dyslexics who have had training in touch typing can reinforce phonics knowledge, use muscle memory to learn word spellings, and facilitate the translation of ideas into written language.

This renders the writing process less frustrating and makes composing written work more fluid and effective.

Dysgraphia is a specific learning difficulty that affects writing skills. While no two individuals will experience the same set of symptoms, dysgraphia can cause difficulty with forming letters, spacing words and even organizing text into complete sentences. Students with dysgraphia may struggle with taking notes in class, completing homework and long-term assignments, and performing well on traditional assessment measures.

Producing text by hand is often both difficult and painful, causing everything from cramping in the muscles of the hand to excessive sweating and high anxiety. Over time, this can lead to poor performance and falling behind in lessons due to an inability to take notes. It may also result in avoidance of school and extra-curricular activities that involve writing.

Fortunately, there are strategies and classroom accommodations for dysgraphia that can help. These include allowing the use of audio-recorders in the classroom and teaching touch-typing so computers can be used as an alternative to handwriting.