Literacy – Spanning North America :: Pickering ON :: Redlands CA :: Wichita Falls TX

Literacy: Spanning North America

@LitDurham

Provincial Grant Helping Build Inclusive Community

Durham Region: 6.21.2019

A bibliotherapy initiative, spearheaded by the Literacy Network of Durham Region, was given high praise on June 21.

Pickering-Uxbridge MPP Peter Bethlenfalvy and Joan Young, an Ontario Trillium Foundation (OTF) volunteer visited LiNDR’s 25th annual general meeting in Pickering to speak with the group. Bethlenfalvy also congratulated the group on the work that has been done to create a Bibliotherapy initiative, which is taking place in the community as a result of receiving a $39,100 seed grant from the OTF in 2018.

“Our government is proud to be investing in this important initiative, which will help build a stronger, more inclusive community in Pickering-Uxbridge,” said MPP Bethlenfalvy. “Since day one, we have been focused on providing support to those who need it — in Durham Region, and across the province.”

Bibliotherapy is the use of reading materials, fiction, poetry and memoirs, to help people dealing with mental, physical, emotional, developmental or social problems. The book choices are used to create topic-related group sessions that speak to specific life problems and promote resilience, such as inspirational stories about overcoming addictions.  READ MORE >>

@AKSmileyPL

Celebrate Adult Learners’ Successes!

Redlands Reads: May 2019

Throughout the year learners use their new reading and writing skills to reach new goals. The following highlights recent achievements:

Thirty-nine learners submitted works for publication in the adult literacy anthology, Our Stories, A Collection of Writing, Volume 2. This anthology, which will be published in the spring, includes personal memories, reflections on readings, poems, and inspired writings.

Nine learners participated in the Southern California Library Literacy Network’s 18th Annual Writer to Writer Challenge. This writing challenge invites adult learners throughout southern California to write a letter to an author whose book inspired them. Tanya Jauregui, was awarded runner-up in the intermediate writer category. She wrote a letter to Joan Anderson, author of A Year by the Sea. Tanya wrote, “After reading your book, it made me realize that women have their own keys to their happiness.”

One learner completed the Adult Literacy Leadership Institute Bootcamp and several learners have made public presentations to community groups. Another learner assists the adult literacy computer instructor. Learners began reading words, sentences, and books on their own. More than a dozen learners reported that they had advanced in their employment. Some learners are pursuing certifications, citizenship, or have graduated from the Adult Literacy program having met their literacy goals.

All learners are to be congratulated for their commitment to improve their literacy.  READ MORE >>

Wichita Adult 

Literacy Council

Leader At Wichita Area Literacy Council Since Beginnings Lauded As She Steps Down

Greenbay Press Gazette: 6.25.2109 by Judith K. McGinnis, Times Record News

Anyone who has ever worked with, volunteered for or learned from Sara Shelton agrees to one thing.

She is the heart and soul of Wichita Adult Literacy Council.

After 25 years as WALC executive director Sara stepped down from the position in April to continue her battle with cancer.

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“We started with six people and now we work with 300-400 adults every year,” Shelton said. “I was surprised how quickly the program grew.”

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“Over the years Sara has helped countless WALC clients with their unique needs,” said Cindy Price who spent 4 years working for the Literacy Council. “She would get on the phone and advocate for them. Whether it was helping a client get dentures when they had no money to pay for them or speaking with a customer service rep to help a non-English speaking client get a financial issue resolved she was always willing to go to bat for them.”

“Sara's greatest accomplishment has been to keep adult literacy in the forefront of the community,” said Jean Payne, who served on the WALC board for five years. “I commend the newspaper for giving her a regular forum to explain the various ways people struggle to get along in life when they can't read well, how that impacts the entire community in lack of productivity and how it can affect children and grandchildren if they're not encouraged to read at a young age.”  READ MORE >>

43 Million Americans -- said to include R. Kelly -- Struggle To Read And Write via ABC News

43 Million Americans -- said to include R. Kelly -- Struggle To Read And Write

ABC News: 7.29.2019 by Meghan Keneally

PIAAC

George is a 79-year-old retiree who ran a car detailing business for two decades, repaired airplanes, served as a deacon in his church and has nine children.

Brittani Bellamy is a 28-year-old who just recently got her own apartment, is practicing to get her driver’s license and works at Universal Studios.

They may not be at similar stages in their lives, but they share one defining characteristic: they’re among the estimated 43 million Americans who struggle to read or write.

The issue of adult literacy was cast into the spotlight recently when the legal team for singer R. Kelly cited his long-rumored illiteracy as to why he didn't show up to court for a sex abuse lawsuit. He is also facing a slew of criminal sex abuse charges, which he has always denied.

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The notion that all or most native English speakers in America know how to read and write -- at least on a basic level -- is widespread and false, research shows.

The Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, which is cited by the U.S. Department of Education, defines literacy as “the ability to understand, evaluate, use and engage with written texts to participate in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.” It divides the population into five levels -- with levels 2 and above being considered literate.

According to PIAAC, one in five U.S. adults has "low literacy" skills, which includes those classified as being either level 1 or below.

There are an estimated 26.5 million adults at level 1 according to PIAAC -- those who can read and write at the most basic level but couldn’t read a newspaper or would have trouble filling out forms at a doctor’s office. Another estimated 8.4 million people are below level 1 and considered "functionally illiterate." There are also 8.2 million others who were unable to participate in the survey because of either a language barrier or a cognitive or physical inability, and the PIAAC data classifies them as also having low literacy abilities.    READ MORE >>

National Literacy & Library Events :: August 2019

National Literacy & Library Events :: August 2019

Literacy & Library Events & Conferences

Events-National & International Events

Events-International: Language Magazine

Read A Romance Month

Aug. 01      Digipalooza 2019 Cleveland OH

Aug. 02      National Coloring Book Day

Aug. 02      National Book Club Conference Atlanta GA

Aug. 06      Distance Teaching & Learning Conference Madison WI

Aug. 09      Book Lovers Day

Aug. 09      SCBWI Summer Conference Los Angeles CA

Aug. 10      Annual Picture Book 10 for 10

Aug. 16      Minnesota Health Literacy Best Practices Conf Saint Paul MN

Aug. 20      Intl Adult Literacy Learners and Tutors Conference Uganda

Aug. 24      IFLA World Library and Information Congress Athens Greece

Aug. 26      WorldCat Birthday

State Library Associations :: Conferences

African American Book Events

Book Fairs by State Library of Congress

Children’s Book Council Kid Lit Events

College Children’s & Young Adult Literature Conferences Festivals

Everfest Book Festival Calendar

ILA :: Literacy Calendar Worldwide

Storytelling Events

US Book Festivals

Literacy – Spanning North America :: Invermere BC :: Luxemburg WI :: Farmington ME :: Wilmington NC

Literacy: Spanning North America

@cbaliteracy

Nelson Woman Celebrated For Achievement In Literacy

Neslon Star: 6.18.2019 by Tyler Harper

Paulina Mason used to struggle to comprehend printed words and sentences.

Ten years later, the Nelson native is an aspiring author, a literacy advocate and the recipient of a local award that honours dedication to a task most take for granted — reading.

Mason, 28, was feted Friday by the Columbia Basin Alliance for Literacy (CBAL) with its ninth annual award handed out to an adult literacy student, while Kootenay Co-op was also recognized for its commitment to learning in the workplace.

A decade ago Mason had just finished high school when her mother Barb asked CBAL to help her daughter.

“I learn by visuals and sounds, symbols and pictures,” said Mason. “The old school way, sound this out, figure that out, I can’t do that because my brain doesn’t click to that.”

She describes her first tutor, a woman named Ellen, as a grandmother to Mason. “It’s nice to have that support other than school. Just knowing that someone wants to help you and see your progress in a good way, it was awesome.”

Community literacy co-ordinator Joan Exley said Mason has progressed from pupil to volunteer mentor at CBAL.  READ MORE >>

Literacy Partners 

Kewaunee Co

Retirees Aid Adult Literacy Efforts and See Lives Transformed

Door County Daily News: 6.18.2019 by Ben Caxton

Marge Weichelt wanted to stay connected to Kewaunee when she retired from teaching. The Kewaunee County Literacy Partnership provided that opportunity for her and, later on, for her husband, Joel. Both now serve as adult literacy tutors. Marge meets weekly with adult workers at East Shore Industries. Joel stepped up to tutor a young man from Mexico with limited English skills after his previous tutor had to quit for health reasons.  LISTEN 02:12

LVFSC

Literacy Volunteers Looks To Expand

Daily Bulldog: 6.19.2019 by Amber Kapiloff

A small non-profit is looking toward big changes ahead thanks to a recently awarded grant that is addressing the grand scheme of things, according to Literacy Volunteers of Franklin and Somerset County Executive Director Barbara Averill.

"We've come such a long way in the last year. It's gratifying to receive such a vote of confidence," Averill said.

The $36,000 Betterment Fund grant will be spread out over a three-year period- a characteristic that Averill said they were specifically looking for. The two-person staff at LV has secured $50,000 worth of grants in the last year alone, but only the Betterment Fund will be in place for an extended amount of time.

In addition to having a longer life, which offers a sense of security Averill said, the grant is also not program specific. Averill and her assistant, Sara Beech, can use the funds wherever they are needed. In Averill's opinion, that was a no-brainer.

"We want to look at opportunities in the northern region [of the county] that build collaboration. We know the need is there, but we also know that you can't just go lolling into a community and say 'here we are, come on in,'" she said.

Thanks to the grant, Averill, Beech and the 72 volunteers that make up LV have begun the process of searching for two new anchor sites for programming.  READ MORE >>

@cfliteracy

Cape Fear Literacy Council Changing Lives By Teaching Adults How To Read

WWAYTV 3: 6.21.2019 by Jeff Rivenbark

While most people have literacy skills, a surprisingly high number of people across the Cape Fear lack these skills and are either unable to read or have extreme difficulty doing so.

Since its formation, the Cape Fear Literacy Council (CFLC) has recruited, trained and certified approximately 2,000 volunteer tutors, and has donated thousands of hours helping adult learners across the region.

Alan Perry, owner of Perry’s Emporium in Wilmington, served as a CFLC board member for 22 years.

“I’ve always had a passion for literacy because my father never got past the second grade and he didn’t ever really learn how to read,” Perry said. “This is something I’ve always been passionate about.”

Perry says an estimated 50,000 people living in Pender, New Hanover and Brunswick counties are unable to read.  WATCH 03:11

Communicating When Naked: Lessons Learned as a Patient via Health Literacy

Communicating When Naked: Lessons Learned as a Patient

Health Literacy: 7.01.2019 by Helen Osborne

Too many friends and family members are dealing with serious medical issues these days. In their honor and on the 14th anniversary of dealing with my own, I am sharing some lessons learned from my perspective as a patient. These tips are brief excerpts from my Health Literacy from A to Z book in the chapter, “Communicating When Patients Feel Scared, Sick, and Overwhelmed” and an On Call column I wrote in 2006, “Communicating when Naked: My Perspective as a Patient.

Talking about health and other medical matters had always been easy for me. As an occupational therapist and health literacy consultant, I felt confident and in charge of conversations no matter which professional “hat” I was wearing. But after a routine mammogram turned out not to be so routine, I felt more than hatless. I felt naked. Now I had to communicate not as a provider or consultant, but as a patient. I was often so flooded with emotion that I had trouble thinking and remembering. Eventually conversations got easier and I learned what I needed to know and do. I learned something else, too. Health literacy truly matters—to all of us who are, or ever will be, on either side of health conversations. Here are some tips and lessons learned:

Invite family members or friends to act as advocates.

Overcome communication barriers.

If you use hearing aids or eyeglasses, bring them to your appointments.

Learn only as much as you want to know.

Create your own medical record.

Tests, test results, and medical instructions

Print-outs of patient education materials

Medication lists, healthcare proxy, and other important papers

Questions to ask, with space to write the answers

Extra pages for notes or whatever else I want to remember

READ MORE >>

Why Plain English Isn’t ‘dumbing down’ via Medium

@govplainlang

Why Plain English Isn’t ‘dumbing down’

Medium: 9.24.2017 by Dominic Warren

I was in a meeting recently and was finally confronted with a phrase I’ve been expecting to hear since I started in content design. “No, I don’t agree, that’s just dumbing down.” Someone had finally used the words “dumbing down” when discussing the content. It’s been a long time coming.

Without an understanding of content and how users read on the web, it would be easy to just chuck all the information you know onto the page. But there’s important reasons we use plain English and write the way we do.

Plain English

Google Dictionary defines plain English as:

“clear and unambiguous language, without the use of technical or difficult terms”

It’s using language simply so it’s as easy to understand as possible.

We do this because we don’t read on the web the same way we read printed media, such as books and newspapers. We scan the page. As mentioned in a previous article, we don’t read fluidly, we saccade. This is when your eyes move from one point of the page to the other in no particular order, jumping quickly all over the place.

Our content also has to fight against outside influences. Our readers have lives, thoughts and emotions that can get in the way of reading huge amounts of technical text online. They might have children fighting for their attention, or they might have been through a recent trauma. They might just have something better and more interesting to do. So making the content easy to understand and simple to follow is the most important thing we can do as writers.

This is why content should be task-focused where possible, especially for services. If we want the user to do something, tell them what to do and how to do it quickly and easily. They don’t have the time to sit down and read through guidance after guidance. If they need to know something, tell them it straight away at the top of the page. READ MORE >>

ILA Makes It Clear: Students Need Systematic, Explicit Phonics via EdWeek

Meeting the Challenges of 

Early Literacy Phonics Instruction

Influential Reading Group Makes It Clear: Students Need Systematic, Explicit Phonics

EdWeek: 7.18.2019 by Stephen Sawchuk

The International Literacy Association has put out a new brief endorsing "systematic and explicit" phonics in all early reading instruction.

"English is an alphabetic language. We have 26 letters. These letters, in various combinations, represent the 44 sounds in our language," the ILA brief released last week reads. "Teaching students the basic letter-sound combinations gives them access to sounding out approximately 84% of the words in English print." 

It's a strong statement from an influential, big-tent organization whose members, which include teachers, researchers, and parents, have traditionally held a wide range of views on reading approaches.

"

It's kind of a refreshing piece," said Timothy Shanahan, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "A lot of people think ILA is an anti-phonics group, but it's a large group."

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This may seem like common sense: Of course students need to be taught letters and sounds. But for any of you who have spent any time in the early-reading space, it gets right to the heart of the decades-old reading wars.

Almost all reading researchers agree that factors like motivation, access to a print-rich environment, and good books matter in a reading program. The reading wars are really a debate on a small—but critical—piece: The relative importance of phonics, sometimes called "decoding."

The pro-phonics folks tend to view phonics as a bridge to meaning, reasoning that they're a necessary step toward being able to read any word. Proponents of whole language or its successor "balanced literacy," which is a common approach used in U.S. schools today, generally emphasize meaning first, mixing small-group reading of literature with lots of student choice of reading materials. Those approaches tend to subordinate phonics, emphasizing learning words through memorization, context clues, and pictures.  READ MORE >>

Literacy – Spanning the US :: Centreville MI :: Southern Pines NC :: Greenfield MA

Literacy: Spanning the US

SJCLC

Literacy Council Seeks Additional Tutors

Sturgis Journal: 6.12.2019 by Michelle Patrick

St. Joseph County Literacy Council was established in the mid-1980s.

The group’s primary focus is teaching adults to read, said Ron Hooker, council president.

Hooker said any adult resident of the county is eligible for free tutoring, either to learn to read or to improve reading ability.

Among 83 counties in of Michigan, St. Joseph County ranks 12th from the bottom in terms of literacy rates, Hooker said. St. Joseph County has an illiteracy rate of 9.3 percent for adults, he said, meaning those adults aren’t able to read past a third-grade level.

“If you think about it, of all the people you see walking around, one out of 11 of them can’t read past a third-grade level,” Hooker said. “People don’t know it.”

Because of the stigma of illiteracy, many adults who can’t read try to hide the fact the best they can, Hooker said. That’s why he commends each new student for wanting to better their life.

Hooker said students come to the council for various reasons, but the primary reason is to be able to read when searching for employment opportunities.  READ MORE >>

Moore County 

Literacy Council

Moore County Literacy Council Growing Its Reach

The Pilot: 6.13.2019 by Laura Douglass

Quietly working to improve lives one student at a time, the Moore County Literacy Council provides free literacy tutoring to individuals of all ages. Based in the Read Moore Center in Southern Pines, the organization serves around 100 adult students each year through one-on-one tutoring.

“I feel like we’ve been a best kept secret organization,” said Executive Director Stuart Mills, “but, we have been growing in both size and scope of our programs.”

An estimated 10 percent of Moore County’s adult population is functionally illiterate.

The Moore County Literacy Council (MCLC) has traditionally focused on providing free basic literacy education and English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). Instruction areas include life skills, citizenship, GED preparation, career readiness, computer skills and family literacy. The majority of MCLC’s adult students enter at a third grade level or less.

However, through grant programs and partnerships with Moore County Schools and other local nonprofits, including the United Way of Moore County, MCLC has grown its outreach programming to serve more families and children’s literacy needs.  READ MORE >>

The Literacy Project

Literacy Project Students Write, Choose Poems For Food Poetry Walk

Greenfield Recorder:  6.13.2019 by Anita Fritz

Maricella Obondo had a dream — she wanted a better life for her children, she wanted to learn English and how to read.

Today, Obondo’s poem, “The Dream,” hangs in the window of The Literacy Project on Bank Row as part of its first Poetry Walk. The walk’s theme is food.

Obondo is a student in Beth Byrne’s HiSET class at The Literacy Project in Greenfield — there is also an office in Orange. HiSET (High School Equivalency Test) is what was formerly known at GED (General Education Diploma).

“When you move from another country to start a new life, you have a dream,” she said. “My childhood was very hard, I was trying to survive every day. When I saw the United States, it felt like the promised land. I’m OK now. I feel at peace here with my kids.”  READ MORE >>

The Internet Is Changing the English Language. Is That a Good Thing? via Time

Because Internet

The Internet Is Changing the English Language. Is That a Good Thing?

Time:  7.18.2019 by Katy Steinmetz

For more than 600 years, English speakers used because as a conjunction meaning “for the reason that,” dutifully following it with a full clause of explanation (or at least the word of). Then, a few years ago, this old standby suddenly began bursting with new life, as people started using it to form terse, cheeky rationales in a manner that defied all grammatical decorum: How do you know climate change is real? “Because science.” Why are you sleepy? “Because burrito.” Academics went aflutter, debating whether because had evolved into a preposition and which types of nouns fit this newfangled construction. But there was little disagreement on the driving force behind the change.

The title of Gretchen McCulloch’s new book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, is a homage to this kind of linguistic metamorphosis — evolution made possible by the ascendance of the web and the unprecedented explosion of informal writing that has come with it. Her aim is to explain how the Internet has shaped language, as billions of people have become authors and found ways to type out the flirtations ( 😘) and frustrations (aklefj;awkjfdsafjka!!!) and quotidian blurghs that for centuries existed only as informal speech.

McCulloch is an Internet linguist (yes, that is a real job), and her book about Internetlanguage is, fittingly, a mash-up drawn from academic and Internet cultures. She breaks down concepts like diglossia — an instance when two varieties of a language are spoken in the same community — as she casually deploys online speak like “meatspace” (the physical world, opposite to cyberspace). In some measure, Because Internet offers a history of the web, an introduction to linguistics and a survey of the most fascinating research from her field, including a study that took advantage of geotags on social media to show how new slang words spread from place to place. READ MORE >>