Part 1

A quick Google search of 'lit­er­a­cy stats in Trinidad and To­ba­go' will leave you pleas­ant­ly sur­prised, but al­so pos­si­bly con­fused about the need for an or­gan­i­sa­tion like Al­ta. Ac­cord­ing to Un­esco sta­tis­tics, since 1990 Trinidad and To­ba­go has en­joyed a steady growth in our al­ready su­perb lit­er­a­cy rate which stood at 96.9 per cent in 1990 and is record­ed as 99 per cent as of 2015.

On the oth­er hand, the 1994 Al­ta and 1995 UWI Na­tion­al Lit­er­a­cy Sur­veys show that 22-23 per cent of our peo­ple aged 15 and over, are un­able to cope with every­day read­ing and writ­ing. That's al­most one in four Trinida­di­ans and To­bag­o­ni­ans who were not lit­er­ate. Al­though these sur­veys were done over a decade ago, it is high­ly un­like­ly that a sur­vey to­day would re­veal any pos­i­tive change.

Al­ta's sur­vey found that eight per cent of peo­ple over 15 years of age (which would have equat­ed to 62,000 adults) could not read even three of these words: to, at, love, sun, bet. A fur­ther 15 per cent of could on­ly read a lit­tle, adding an­oth­er 118,000 adults. Ac­cord­ing to these two sur­veys, at best, our lit­er­a­cy rate stood at 78 per cent in 1995 with some 180,000 adults un­able to cope with every­day ba­sic read­ing and writ­ing.

Why is there such a large dis­par­i­ty in the sta­tis­tics? The an­swer lies in the way lit­er­a­cy is mea­sured. Ac­cord­ing to Un­esco's In­sti­tute for Sta­tis­tics, most coun­tries gain in­for­ma­tion about lit­er­a­cy rates from years of school­ing, a na­tion­al house­hold sur­vey or cen­sus. The typ­i­cal ques­tion asked is, Can you read and write? Giv­en the stig­ma as­so­ci­at­ed with not be­ing lit­er­ate, many peo­ple do not an­swer hon­est­ly pro­duc­ing un­re­li­able sta­tis­tics.

Fur­ther to this, the ques­tion can you read and write? does not spec­i­fy to what lev­el. So some­one who can on­ly write their name and ad­dress and iden­ti­fy some words, may an­swer yes but it would not be cor­rect to say they are lit­er­ate enough to func­tion in our so­ci­ety, where they are faced with print at every turn–whether you are buy­ing food or get­ting your dri­ving li­cence.

As for the years of school­ing, be­ing en­rolled in pri­ma­ry and even sec­ondary school does not equate to be­ing able to read and write. A look at SEA re­sults is all you need to negate this. If not, con­sid­er that al­most all stu­dents at Al­ta's lit­er­a­cy class­es have at­tend­ed pri­ma­ry school, and some have gone all the way through sec­ondary school. There are a pletho­ra of rea­sons rang­ing from dys­func­tion­al homes to learn­ing dif­fi­cul­ties which have an im­pact on whether a child de­vel­ops lit­er­a­cy.

Giv­en the in­ac­cu­ra­cy of the sta­tis­tics, Un­esco's In­sti­tute for Sta­tis­tics has de­vel­oped the Lit­er­a­cy As­sess­ment and Mon­i­tor­ing Pro­gramme (Lamp) which mea­sures lit­er­a­cy on a con­tin­u­um. Lamp is meant to de­vel­op a glob­al method­olog­i­cal stan­dard for mea­sur­ing lit­er­a­cy in a way that can be com­pared across coun­tries at dif­fer­ent stages of de­vel­op­ment and lit­er­a­cy con­texts. This is much more ef­fec­tive as it en­sures that sta­tis­tics are much more ac­cu­rate.

Al­ta has tack­led our low lit­er­a­cy rate by pro­vid­ing free read­ing and writ­ing class­es to adults (16+) since 1992. Reg­is­tra­tion takes place in Sep­tem­ber.

Join us next week as we look at the im­pact of low lev­els of lit­er­a­cy on T&T.

For more in­for­ma­tion about join­ing an Al­ta class or vol­un­teer­ing with Al­ta, call 624-2582.