Concerning part of the background, few people know that we have a so-called “functional” illiteracy problem. Of the relatively few who do know, almost no one knows the massive extent of that problem, or the nature of the problem, itself.
It would be reasonable to conclude that “functional” illiteracy must mean that there are literate people who can read fluently but who are, because of some defect, incapable of understanding what they are reading. Such a condition does, of course, exist but more commonly with computer software than with human beings. Computer software can read aloud anything that is printed here with quick and astonishing accuracy but is incapable of understanding any of it. However, a vast group of true “functional” illiterates are very different from the two groups just mentioned, the people with defective understanding, and the computers with no understanding. With this third group, the problem is not that they
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The reason is that he could very probably answer “reading comprehension questions” correctly if the selection is simple enough. Such tests of so-called “reading comprehension” are the standard test for reading ability today. Yet, of course, he certainly is not literate since the English language has over half a million words. While words taken from the list of the 1,000 most frequent do form 90% of almost anything, a truly successful reader is able to “hear” and so to pronounce aloud, not just those words, but all of the words in the selection, even if he does not know their meanings. A truly successful reader can read aloud just as accurately as computer software can read, and for the same reason, because he has been correctly “programmed” to read the sounds of syllables in words, and the very occasional truly irregular words (such as