The Importance of Adult Literacy Issues in Social Work Practice

Abstract

For many reasons, it is not uncommon for some clients to procrastinate, make excuses, or engage in noncompliant behavior in social work interactions. For some clients, however, these responses are an attempt to hide poor literacy skills. There are many indicators of the extent of low literacy in our nation. For example, according to the most recent national assessment of literacy skills, conducted in 2003, nearly 16 percent of the adult population reads and understands at a below basic level of literacy and has difficulty with daily functional reading tasks. Approximately 28 percent of the adult population is at the basic level of literacy and can only perform simple and everyday reading tasks. People with low literacy skills have difficulty with tasks such as identifying a location on a map and calculating the total costs of ordering supplies from a catalog (National Center for Education Statistics, n.d.). Other indicators come from sources such as the census. According to the 2000 Census, approximately 23 percent of adults in the United States did not graduate from high school or get a high school equivalency diploma (Lasater & Elliott, 2004). Even with a high school diploma, many individuals read three or four years below their highest grade of completion in school (Hochhauser, 1997). Twenty percent of the adults born in the United States and immigrants who speak English proficiently have only basic skills that are considered insufficient for the workplace (Comings, Reder, & Sum, 2001). When people with low literacy skills are asked about their ability to read, many report that they can read well. For example, according to reports of the National Adult Literacy Survey a high percentage (66 percent to 75 percent) of adults reading at the lowest literacy skill level described themselves as being able to read or very (Kirsch, Jungeblut, Jenkins, & Kolstad, 1993). Some adult learners in the study reported that they could read well because in their daily lives they are able to read what they need to get along and therefore do not realize how deficient their reading skills truly are. Others were simply providing socially desirable answers. Many individuals with low literacy recoil or become defensive at the mention of anything that might expose their literacy issues, and they often find complicated ways to hide their poor literacy skills. For example, we have worked with students who cannot tell time. Their employers do not realize that this is an issue because the students rely on environmental clues to help them get through the day. Specifically, in the morning, the beginning of a particular television show signals that it is time to leave the house; people leaving their offices in the middle of the day indicates that it is lunch time; and people leaving the office at the end of the day provides clues that the work day is done. Many people with low reading abilities are ashamed of their circumstances. In a study of patients in acute care at a large public hospital in Atlanta, Parikh and colleagues (1996) found that nearly 40 percent of individuals who reported having low literacy skills admitted their feelings of shame. Sixty-seven percent of their interviewees had never told their spouses, more than half had never told their children, relatives, or friends of their problems with reading and understanding what they read, and the vast majority had likewise never told coworkers or supervisors. Here's a typical scenario we encounter in the course of our work. Jane (pseudonym) is an unemployed 55-year-old African American woman who recognizes words at the 3.8 grade level and has attended our three-month adult literacy class. She completed the ninth grade and dropped out of school because she found it too difficult and was constantly embarrassed by her poor reading skills. Family members also encouraged her to drop out because they needed help taking care of her younger siblings. …