LONDON, April 23 (Xinhua)
-- The holding of World Book Night
on Tuesday throws light on the
surprising fact that one in six
of the British population struggle
with reading.
The figure comes
from a survey in 2012 by the
Literacy Trust, which found that
nearly 17 percent of British adults
had literacy skills below those
expected of an 11 year
old.
The same survey also
found that at the crucial age
of 16, when most British children sit
their first significant batch of
public exams in everything from
English language to mathematics, those
children from poorer backgrounds performed
less well.
This link between
relative poverty and rates of academic
achievement was seen in exam pass
rates, with just 21 percent of poorer
pupils achieving the top grades in
exams compared with 49 percent from
more affluent backgrounds.
This
handicap for poorer children starts
early in life, with just 35 percent
of five year olds in deprived
areas reaching expected levels of
learning, against 51 percent from other
areas.
The national British
charity Beanstalk has been working for
decades to tackle problems of poor
literacy rates among younger
children.
Beanstalk's chief
executive officer Sue Porto told
Xinhua at her charity's London
headquarters, "Literacy is the most
fundamental foundation block for a
child growing up in order to be
able to give them the skills
that they need in order to
reach their full
potential."
"I'm particularly
passionate about that because my
background was as a senior manager
in the prison service for 16 years,
so I have seen at first hand
the impact of illiteracy and the
all-too catastrophic consequences in terms
of how it is so life-limiting
for a young person."
She
added, "I think reading books is
of the utmost importance to a
child because it helps them experience
worlds and things that they might
otherwise not experience and it helps
to create that rich tapestry upon
which life is built."
Beanstalk
provides intensive, one-to-one reading
support in primary schools for
children who have struggled to learn
to read.
It recruits and
trains reading helpers from local
communities and local businesses who
go into schools twice a week
for a minimum of a year and
who work with children on an
intensive basis throughout the course
of that year to help them catch
up to where they need to
be.
Initial sessions would
concentrate on relaxing the child and
building a bond with the
helper.
"Because for so many
of the children that we work
with they do not have a
constant adult role model in their
lives and they do not have
anybody to give them that time
just to have conversation. What we
find is that if a child has
very low confidence and very low
self-esteem, they can actually be
quite frightened of books," said
Porto.
"All of our reading
helpers are phonics aware. So, as
part of our training we deliver
phonics training although we don't
promote any one particular reading
methodology that they have to use,
it is all about what works with
the child," added
Porto.
According to Porto, one
in four young offenders in custody
in Britain do not have basic
literacy skills with poor consequences
for society.
Porto said, "We
saw in the summer riots of 2011
the catastrophic consequences of violence
for communities. 48 percent of all the
people arrested in the London riots
were functionally illiterate. And from
an economic perspective, illiteracy costs
the UK economy 81 billion pounds in
2012."
（Editor：HuangBeibei、Liang
Jun）
