Little Linguists

Janitors have been fired because they cannot read an after-hours note with special clean-up instructions. Families have been evicted from their apartment when the apartment owner falsely claimed that the rental contract allows eviction if a crying baby disturbs other tenants; the evicted tenants do not object fearing their illiteracy will be exposed. The taking of medicines poses a danger to those who cannot read the instructions on the medicine bottles. Children who have medical emergencies face life-and-death situations if their illiterate parents have become lost because they cannot read the street signs.

These and hundreds of similar “horror stories” occur all around us every day — most of them without our knowledge because functional illiterates are extremely good at hiding their illiteracy. Illiterates cannot get by in our complex society as well as they should and must constantly endure at least thirty-four different kinds of serious physical, financial, and emotional problems. Many simple tasks we take for granted are impossible for illiterates.

The shocking 1993 report with the title Adult Literacy in America was the most extensive study of illiteracy ever commissioned by the U.S. government. It was a five-year, $14 million study involving lengthy interviews of 26,049 U.S. adults statistically chosen to represent the entire U.S. population. It grouped interviewees into five groups according to their ability to read. The report shows that the average yearly earnings were: Level 1 (the least literate), $2105; Level 2, $5225; Level 3, $9090, and Levels 4 and 5 combined, $16,311. The threshold poverty level for an individual in 1993 was $7363 per year. Shockingly, 22 percent of U.S. adults were Level 1 and 26.7 percent were Level 2. This indicates that 48.7 percent of U.S. adults had average annual earnings SIGNIFICANTLY below the poverty level, mostly because of their functional illiteracy.

The report of a study done by the same group who did the 1993 study was issued in 2006 showing no significant improvement over the 1993 results.

We do not see 48.7 percent of U.S. adults in poverty because most households have more than one employed adult and because low-income households receive financial assistance from the government (from our taxes) or from family, friends, and charities.

Benefits of Ending Illiteracy

• You will benefit emotionally if you are concerned that people you know are — or will be — functionally illiterate.
• You will benefit if you object to an average personal cost of $5186 each year as a result of illiteracy for (1) taxes for government programs that illiterates use and for the truancy, juvenile delinquency, and crime directly related to illiteracy and (2) higher prices for consumer goods due to illiterates in the workplace.
• You will benefit if you are employed or if you have financial interests in a business or organization in which you invest time or money. Illiteracy affects all organizations to some extent, some of them seriously.
• You will benefit if our nation improves the trade balance, national relationships, and our national employment by improving communication between nations.

The Solution to Illiteracy

Linguists tell us that Dr. Johnson made a very serious linguistic error in preparing his dictionary in 1755. Instead of freezing the spelling of the sounds of the English language, he froze the spelling of words. Present-day English is thus based upon the spelling of words from the languages of eight nations who occupied the British Isles before 1755.

Professor Julius Nyikos found that there are at least 1768 ways of spelling forty sounds in English! There is not even one invariable spelling rule in English — some of the exceptions have exceptions! As a result, every word in a person’s vocabulary must be learned, one at a time, either by rote memory or by repeated use. As a result, many scholars believe the obvious solution to English illiteracy is spelling reform.

Consider these facts about spelling reform:

• Dozens of scholars for over 250 years have recommended it.
• Several nations, smaller and larger than the U.S., both advanced and third-world, have simplified their spelling.
• A simpler spelling system has been proven effective for making learning to read easier in more than 300 alphabetic languages but never tried in English. In 295 languages (at least 98% of them) students become fluent readers in less than three months. Most of the approx. 51 percent of U.S. adults who do become functionally literate require two to four YEARS.
• All reasonable objections to spelling reform have been thoroughly debunked by several distinguished linguists and educators.
• The need is greater than ever in our increasingly complex world, but it has never been tried in English.

The new book, Let’s End Our Literacy Crisis, details a recently proposed spelling reform called NuEnglish which is scientifically designed to use the spelling of every sound (1) as it is most often spelled in English, as are 82% of the NuEnglish spellings of the sounds, (2) as people expect a certain sound to be spelled, as in all of the other spellings, and (3) uses a perfect one-to-one ratio of letters-to-sounds. Many years of research examining dozens of spelling reform proposals has not revealed any other spelling reform proposal which has even one of these characteristics.

To learn NuEnglish, students only need to learn the spelling of 38 sounds instead of all 20,000 or more words in their reading vocabulary. It is so simple that present readers of English have learned NuEnglish spelling in about five minutes.

Adoption of NuEnglish will enable about 600 million of the more than 1.3 billion English-speaking people around the world who cannot read English very well — over 93 million in the U.S. alone — to be able to learn to read English in less than three months, as they do in almost all other alphabetic languages. Without adoption of NuEnglish, based upon present statistics, less than two percent of U.S. adult illiterates will ever become fluent readers.

(C) Copyright 2009 Bob C. Cleckler — All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Bob C. Cleckler,
CEO of Literacy Research Assoc., Inc.,
Vice Pres. of R & D of NuEnglish, Inc.,
author of 4 published books on ending illiteracy.

Let’s End Our Literacy Crisis, (LEOLC) rev. ed., published in mid-2009 by American University & Colleges Press, was entered in the education category of two major book award competitions, each with over 1000 total entrants. It was one of six finalists in one competition and one of eight finalists in the other. By applying the proposals in LEOLC, we can definitely and permanently end functional illiteracy.

Professor of Special Education at Eastern New Mexico University, Michael F. Shaughnessy, Ph.D. read LEOLC and emailed the author, “I agree with you 100%!” Carefully, honestly read all of this amazing book and you will too.

LEOLC describes the revolutionary spelling system, NuEnglish, in which the spelling of only 38 sounds is needed. And 82% of these sounds are spelled as they are MOST OFTEN spelled in English and the rest are spelled the way they are EXPECTED to be spelled. (For example we expect the letter F to have the sound as in “fan.” but more often it has the V sound entirely because of the common word “of.” There is a perfect one-to-one relation of sound to spelling.

For more infomation see http://nuenglish.org This website has a free Respeller program which will convert up to about 25 pages of English material to NuEnglish in a few seconds and flag English words not in the database, and for book infomation see http://nuenglish.com It is also available from Amazon.com.

Literacy Research Associates, Inc. based in Salt Lake City, Utah and NuEnglish, Inc. based in Phoenix, Arizona are both non-profit educational corporations. NuEnglish, Inc. is also a 509(a)(2) public charity.