Jackman-Atkinson: New form of illiteracy

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By: Kate Jackman-Atkinson

myWestman.ca

For the newspaper industry, literacy is an important topic. Without literacy, we would be unable to exist. For those who struggle with reading and comprehension, picking up a paper isn’t a relaxing or enjoyable experience. 

Traditionally, people think of literacy in a basic way. Can you read the letters and sentences on the page? Thanks to stay in school legislation and additional instruction for children who struggle in school, illiteracy rates, in the traditional sense, have been falling.

While this trend is cause for celebration, there is still work to be done. The Canadian Literacy and Learning Network reports that 42 per cent of Canadian adults between the ages of 16 and 65 have low literacy skills. Statistics Canada’s most recent literacy study found that millions of Canadians lack the literacy skills they need to keep pace with the escalating demands of our society and economy. Literacy rates continue to be cause for concern.

But when it comes to literacy, it isn’t just about stringing letters together into words and sentences, there is a new kind of illiteracy on the horizon. This form of illiteracy is a result of the difference between how we read a screen versus how we read printed pages. 

On April 6, the Washington Post published a story about this phenomenon. It highlighted research showing that serious reading has been negatively impacted by online reading, which is dominated by scanning and skimming.

Reading online isn’t linear the way traditional reading is.  When you read a book, you start at the beginning and read each page in sequence, top to bottom, left to right, page to page. When you read online, the sheer quantity of information and competing images and links has conditioned us to scan, searching for key words and scrolling up and down to see photos, videos and linked pages. On a screen, there are graphics and easy references to help organize the relevant history and connected ideas and people we find in text. Such short cuts don’t exist when reading on paper.

Research by cognitive neuroscientists has shown that humans seem to be developing digital brains, with new circuits adapted to skimming through the mass of information we are confronted with online.  They warn, however, that this alternative way of reading is competing with the deep reading circuitry that has been developed over several millennia.

It is becoming increasingly common for educators, including at the university level, to find that their students are struggling with complicated text. Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and one of the foremost experts on the study of reading, has been contacted by numerous English department chairs from around the country who say that their students are having trouble reading the classics. They struggle with the convoluted syntax and construction typical of authors such as George Eliot and Henry James.

The internet is an extremely powerful tool to bring diverse ideas and knowledge to our fingertips. Its very nature makes it interactive and it’s easy to combine text, photos, videos and graphics. It can expose a vast array of information, but recent studies have shown that it isn’t the most effective method to help us thoroughly understand that information. Research has shown that comprehension and learning are better when a person is reading from paper rather than reading from a screen. Interestingly, many students believe the opposite is true.

There are advantages to both types of reading as both are necessary to navigate today’s world. 

The good news is that the brain is ever evolving and skills aren’t lost forever. The digital world is here to stay, which means we must continue to use our screen literacy and the methods we have created to cope with the informational overload we face there. Instead, we need to recondition ourselves and strengthen both skill sets to create a bi-literate brain.