Celebrate International Literacy Day - September 8, 2009

Looking for ways to observe International Literacy Day? Starting today, participate in the Institute’s online Special Topics Discussion titled "World Literacy and Nonformal Education." The online forum will run from Tues., September 8 - Thurs., September 10.

These are some other activities that you can do to celebrate International Literacy Day and support literacy throughout the year.

For Individuals

• Teach someone to read
• Reread a favorite book
• Give a book as a gift
• Sponsor a child in a reading program
• Help a child write and illustrate a book
• Get a library card and use it
• Develop a home library
• Join a book discussion group
• Use television to encourage reading
• Attend readings at your local library or bookstore
• Share your enthusiasm for a book with a child or young adult
• Volunteer to read to patients in a hospital or nursing home
• Ask your friends to tell you about the books that shaped their lives
• Recommend a favorite book to a friend

For Organizations

• Use your newsletter to educate and inform customers and constituents about the importance of reading
• Sponsor a book fair
• Form a reading promotion partnership with a nearby public library or school
• Learn about and support local literacy projects
• Sponsor book awards
• Compile a calendar of community book and reading events
• Organize an essay contest about "a book that changed my life."
• Sponsor a book-collecting contest
• Give awards for reading achievement
• Make a video or DVD that promotes reading
• Publicize and distribute lists of recommended books for readers of all ages
• Take a field trip to a local literacy landmark

The ideas suggested above are provided courtesy of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. For more information about the Center’s literacy projects and publications, visit their Web site. The National Institute for Literacy also offers free literacy and reading publications that can support these activities. Visit www.nifl.gov and click on Publications.

Save the Date for an International Literacy Day Special Discussion

Plan to join Institute Discussion List Moderator David Rosen and guests for a special International Literacy Day online forum titled “World Literacy and Nonformal Education on September 8. Guests Brenda Bell, Barbara Garner, Eric Jacobson, Cecilia S. Ochoa, and Ujwala Samant, will discuss strategies for helping adult literacy educators better understand the contributions of nonformal education on their work in the U.S. from September 8-10. Learn more...

Did You Know?

• Seven million adults, or about 3% of the adult population, could not complete even the most basic literacy tasks in the main assessment of the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) and were given a supplemental assessment.
• Nearly 1 in 5 adults in the nonliterate in English group had a high school diploma or GED. Among them, more than half (representing roughly 600,000 adults) had earned their high school degree in the US.
• For those for whom Spanish is a first language, a delay in learning English is associated with low basic reading skills. Those who learned English before age 11 had basic reading scores similar to average native English speakers (97 words read correctly per minute); however, for those who learned English after age 21, average scores were 35 points (or about one-third) lower. Due to the correlational nature of these data, it is impossible to make causal attributions, i.e., to say that a delay in learning English causes low basic reading skills.
• Adults who took the main literary assessment were able to read, on average, 98 words correctly per minute (wpm), in comparison to 34 wpm by those in the supplemental assessment.

These findings were released in May. To view the report and to learn more about the NAAL, please visit NAAL web site.

Countdown to International Literacy Day - September 8, 2009

On September 8, the nation and the world will celebrate International Literacy Day, a declaration first proclaimed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1965.  UNESCO will use this year’s theme, The Power of Literacy, to highlight the empowering role of literacy and its importance for participation, citizenship and social development. The observance, according to UNESCO, will also serve as a reminder to the international community of the status of literacy and adult learning globally.

Today one in five adults is still not literate and two-thirds of them are women while 75 million children are out of school. Since its founding in 1946, UNESCO has been at the forefront of global literacy efforts and is dedicated to keeping literacy high on national, regional and international agendas. However, with some 776 million adults lacking minimum literacy skills, literacy for all remains an elusive target.

Follow International Literacy Day News and Events

• Visit the Institute’s Literacy in the News page for the latest news and features.
• Visit the Institute’s Literacy Calendar for a listing of International Literacy Day events and more of what’s happening in the field

Last updated: Tuesday, 22-Sep-2009 14:11:49 EDT