Adult Literacy in the United States
What
are the rates of literacy in the United States?
Four
in five U.S. adults (79 percent) have English literacy skills sufficient to
complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information,
paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences—literacy skills at level 2 or
above in PIAAC (OECD
2013).
In
contrast, one in five U.S. adults (21 percent) has difficulty completing these
tasks (figure 1). This translates into 43.0
million U.S. adults who possess low literacy skills: 26.5 million at level
1 and 8.4 million below level 1, while 8.2 million could not participate in
PIAAC’s background survey either because of a language barrier or a cognitive
or physical inability to be interviewed.
These adults who were unable to
participate are categorized as having low English literacy skills, as is done
in international reports (OECD 2013), although no direct assessment of their
skills is available.
Adults
classified as below level 1 may be considered functionally illiterate in
English: i.e., unable to successfully determine the meaning of sentences, read
relatively short texts to locate a single piece of information, or complete
simple forms (OECD 2013)
What
is the make-up of adults with low English literacy skills by nativity status
and race/ethnicity?
U.S.-born
adults make up two-thirds of adults with low levels of English literacy skills
in the United States. However, the non-U.S. born are over-represented among
such low-skilled adults.
Non
U.S.-born adults comprise 34 percent of the population with low literacy
skills, compared to 15 percent of the total population (figure 2).
White
and Hispanic adults make up the largest percentage of U.S. adults with low
levels of English literacy, 35 percent
and 34 percent respectively (figure 3).
By
race/ethnicity and nativity status, the largest percentage of those with low
literacy skills are White U.S.-born adults, who represent one third of such
low-skilled population. Hispanic adults born outside the United States make up
about a quarter of such low-skilled adults in the United States (figure 3).
Using
the data from the Program for the
International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), this Data Point
summarizes the number of U.S. adults with low levels of English literacy and
describes how they differ by nativity status1 and race/ethnicity.
PIAAC
is a large-scale international2 study of working-age adults (ages 16–65) that
assesses adult skills in three domains (literacy, numeracy, and digital problem
solving) and collects information on adults’ education, work experience, and
other background characteristics. In the United States, when the study was
conducted in 2011–12 and 2013–14, respondents were first asked questions about
their background, with an option to be interviewed in English or Spanish,
followed by a skills assessment in English. Because the skills assessment was
conducted only in English, all U.S. PIAAC literacy results are for English
literacy. READ MORE >>
Adult
2019:
Adult Literacy in the United States, NCES 2019-179
2013:
OECD Skills Outlook 2013: First Results from the Survey of Adult Skills, OECD
2009: Literacy
of America's Least Literate Adults, NAAL 2003
2006:
Literacy of America's College Students, AIR
2007: Literacy
in Everyday Life, NAAL 2003
2003:
National Assessment of Adult Literacy, NAAL
2000: Programs
for Adults in Public Library Outlets, USDE,
NCES
1992:
National Adult Literacy Survey, NALS
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