Welcome to the Solution to English Illiteracy.
The Desperately Needed Idea Whose Time Has Come.

How YOU Benefit by Ending America's
"Dirty Little Secret:" Widespread Illiteracy

In the same way that July 4, 1776 began our freedom from British rule,
July 4, 2005, the release date of a breakthrough new book, can, with your
help, begin our freedom from the expense and problems of illiteracy.

About the awards: ForeWord magazine: See http://www.forewordmagazine.com/botya/search2k5.aspx?srchtype=author&srchval=Bob%20C.%20Cleckler This was one of only eight finalist awards in the Education category. There were 1540 total entries in the competition. USABookNews.com:See http://www.usabooknews.com/bestbooks2005awards.html Scroll to the Education/Academics category. This was one of only six finalists out of 49 entries in the Education/Academics category. There were 1000-1100 total entries.

The website you are now viewing is a more complete description of the book describing the humanitarian project for which these awards were given and can be seen by clicking here.

There have been numerous changes made to improve our educational system since the “Nation at Risk” report of 1983. But it would be instructive to consider what Bob Cleckler’s engineering supervisor often reminded him: see “the big picture” or the “complete situation.” As part of a two person team of safety engineers which reviewed every proposal made by engineers to change the propellant manufacturing or rocket motor assembly of solid propellant rockets, failure to consider every possible source of unintended explosive initiation—to “see the big picture”—could get dozens of people killed and millions of dollars worth of product and facilities destroyed.

In 1985 Cleckler read Jonathan Kozol’s book Illiterate America and was shocked at the many ways that illiteracy causes serious financial, emotional, and physical problems and suffering. Cleckler began researching the problem of illiteracy. His job as a safety engineer was an ideal preparation for his research. He tried to find every possible solution to the problem—ideas that educators quite obviously never consider. He tried to see the big picture. He read every book on the subject of his research in the University of Utah’s Marriott Research Library and in the Salt Lake City main library.

His incentive for finding a solution to illiteracy increased tremendously when he saw the extent of illiteracy as proven in the most statistically accurate study of U.S. adult illiteracy ever commissioned by the U.S. government. It was a five-year, $14 million study involving lengthy interviews of 26,700 adults. It was statistically balanced for age, gender, ethnicity, and location—urban, suburban, or rural—in several states across the U.S.

Two reports from this study can be downloaded free on the internet at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93275.pdf and at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs99/1999470.pdf. These studies divided the 26,700 interviewees into five competency levels, depending upon how well they responded to what they were given to read. Level 1 was the least competent. Cleckler’s brief summary of these two reports—which he invites people to check to see that he is not misinterpreting or exaggerating—is as follows. The first report proved that 46% to 51% of U.S. adults—Level 1 and Level 2 adults combined, totaling 90 to 94 million adults— cannot read and write well enough to hold an above-poverty-level-wage job. Level 1 and Level 2 adults earned average yearly wages of only $2225 and $5512, respectively, at a time when the poverty threshold was $7363. Levels 3 and 5, in comparison, earned average yearly wages of $9,090 and $24,379, respectively. The other report proved that 40% or more of employees in U.S. businesses are functionally illiterate.

An April 20, 2003 news report by Fredreka Schouten for Gannett News Service cited numerous facts proving that twenty years of educational reform following the “Nation at Risk” report of 1983 had produced no dramatic results. She stated that “many policy-makers and employers say that schools are in as much trouble as ever.”

Not only is the extent of illiteracy and the severity of the problems and suffering of illiterates much worse than most people realize, but also illiteracy now costs each of us who is not functionally illiterate at least $3700 every year for (1) taxes for government programs that illiterates use, (2) higher consumer prices resulting from the cost of recruiting (since so few candidates are qualified), training employees in basic subjects they should have learned in school, and for preventing and correcting the mistakes and inabilities of illiterates, and (3) taxes for truancy, juvenile delinquency, and crime related to illiteracy.

In addition, illiteracy adversely affects any financial interest you may have in a business or organization—including that of your employer. Besides the three items above, if the business or organization is involved in preparing or selling written material, illiteracy cuts the potential customers almost in half. Furthermore, most U.S. businesses must now compete with more literate foreign workers. The January 2006 U.S. trade balance was worse than any previous month on record.

Although a brief mention of the above studies appeared in some newspapers shortly after the results were released, most of the general public, most of the media, and all but a few of our government leaders have essentially ignored illiteracy. Functional illiterates are so good at hiding their condition that it is an easy problem to ignore—for those who do not have the problem. The reason that 46% or more of U.S. families are not in poverty is that most families have more than one person who is gainfully employed. If all workers in the family are functionally illiterate the family is almost certain to be in poverty.

The Reasons for Our Literacy Crisis

The reasons for our literacy crisis are not obvious if one fails to see the big picture. All efforts at improving our literacy problems, to date, can be considered as fighting the symptoms of the “disease” of illiteracy instead of fighting the cause of the illiteracy, similar to prescribing decongestants, pain-killers, or anti-inflammation agents to fight the symptoms of pneumonia instead of antibiotics to cure the cause of pneumonia.

The picture that we often see concerning efforts at improving literacy is the hundreds, thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people that some programs have helped. But the big picture shows that (1) there are more than 92 million U.S. adult functional illiterates—less than one percent of whom will ever get enough help to then become functionally literate, (2) U.S. schools are pumping out two million or more functional illiterates every year, and (3) there are hundreds of millions of English-speaking people around the world who cannot read English who are not being helped. All of the efforts of everyone combined who is fighting against many of the symptoms of illiteracy are not helping hundreds of millions of illiterates.

It is obvious that the real need is to change the teaching method in such a way as to cure the root cause of illiteracy, rather than the hundreds of half-measures of the last eighty years which only attack the symptoms of illiteracy.

The teaching method more than eighty years ago was not significantly different than today. What is different is that as U.S. life has become more hectic and as more distractions—both negative and positive—began occurring, those methods became much less effective. Negative distractions became more pronounced in the 1960s as discipline problems, gangs, drugs and weapons in the schools, and other negative influences increased. Distractions are positive only in the sense that they are pleasurable activities, but they keep students from being willing to spend the many hours of monotonous drilling and memorizing used previously. Many activities which did not exist eighty years ago fit this description.

As far back as the 1950s, the education gap between the U.S. and other countries was recognized. In Why Johnny Can’t Read, Rudolph Flesch states, “Generally speaking, students in our schools are about two years behind students of the same age in other countries. This is not a wild accusation of the American educational system; it is an established, generally known fact.” The prestigious Eighth American Enterprise World Forum reached essentially the same conclusion. Joseph Cannon, one of the attendees, stated, “This is a crisis and people have said it is a crisis for years.”

The Root Cause of Our Literacy Crisis

To understand the foundational or root cause of English illiteracy, we must understand how we got to this point. As each successive conqueror came to the British Isles, many of the words from the conquering nation’s language were added to the original Celtic language. Present English is a conglomeration of eight different languages: Celtic, Norse, Icelandic, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, German, Danish, and Norman French.

Prior to the mid 1750s, most English writers spelled words the way they sounded. In the mid 1750s, publishers in England hired Dr. Samuel Johnson to prepare a dictionary to standardize the spelling. Linguists tell us that Dr. Johnson knew comparatively little about linguistics and even less about the language source of the words and how they had changed with time. Nevertheless, Dr. Johnson’s dictionary was well received by the publishers and by Dr. Johnson’s peers.

But Dr. Johnson made a very serious linguistic error. He, in essence, froze the spelling of the words instead of freezing the spelling of sounds (or phonemes), as linguistic logic demands. (As you may know, a phoneme is the smallest sound in a language or dialect used to distinguish between words or syllables.) The spelling was bad in 1755 with the issuance of Dr. Johnson’s dictionary because he used the spelling of words as they were spelled (or as he mistakenly believed they were spelled) in the original language. But the pronunciation of words changes with time, so what was bad in 1755 is even worse now.

Only about twenty percent of English words are now phonemic (spelled as they sound)—if you accept only one specific spelling for each different sound, as logic demands. But there is no way to know whether any specific word is spelled phonemically or not because there is not one unique way of spelling each of the phonemes. Furthermore, there is not even one invariable spelling rule in English; every “rule” has exceptions—and many of the exceptions have exceptions. As a result, every word in a person’s vocabulary must be learned one-at-a-time, either by memorization or by repeated use.

That is why some teachers will tell you phonics teaching does not work well. But whole word teaching does not work well either. Most people have a speaking vocabulary of 20,000 to 70,000 words. There is absolutely no way that a student who is not taught to distinguish the letters in a word can remember 20,000 or more words only by their physical appearance.

Whole word type of teaching makes heavy use of context and pictures on the page and, in essence, teaches students to guess at the words. There are often many words that will properly fit the context and will agree with the pictures on the page. Present day students using whole word teaching absolutely cannot read a list of words that they have not already seen and learned.

There are many reasons why any one particular student may not learn to read—the distractions mentioned above or another lack of student motivation, but there is one problem affecting every student: the inconsistent, illogical spelling of the words.

If you believe that illogical spelling is not a serious hindrance to learning, consider the findings of Professor Julius Nyikos of Washington and Jefferson College. Based upon his study of six large U.S. desk dictionaries, he found 1,768 ways of spelling forty English phonemes. If he had used an unabridged dictionary there would have been even more spellings of the phonemes. Only forty spellings are needed—one per phoneme.

As proof of the serious effect that the illogical spelling has upon learning to read, consider the many years of experience of Frank Laubach, founder of Laubach Literacy International. He went around the world teaching adult illiterates to read. He taught students to read in 300 languages. He found that in 295 languages (98% of them) his students became fluent readers in less than three months! Most of the 49% or more of U.S. adults who now become functionally literate require at least two YEARS of the present reading instruction.

How Can We End English Illiteracy?

After almost twenty years of research, analyzing, correlating, writing, and editing, Cleckler is convinced that a perfect one-grapheme-for-one-phoneme spelling system is the only feasible way to completely and permanently end our literacy crisis. (A grapheme is a letter, combination of letters, or a symbol used to represent a phoneme, syllable, or word.)

As far as grammar and syntax is concerned, English is not a difficult language to learn. Linguist Axel Wijk stated that English is “a comparatively easy language to learn for foreigners at least as far as everyday spoken and written forms of it are concerned. This is mainly due to its grammatical structure, which is far simpler than those of most other important languages, particularly so in comparison with French, German, Russian, or Spanish.” Foreigners complaining about the difficulty of learning to read English are really complaining about the spelling, not the language itself.

Several nations both larger and smaller than the U.S., both advanced and third-world, have simplified their spelling (Netherlands, Portugal, Israel, Spain, Turkey, and Russia, among others). Under the leadership of dictator Kemel Pascha, for example, Turkey changed their spelling system during one summer!

We do not have a dictator in America, so compulsion from the executive branch is not the answer. With our legislatures and our congress so deeply involved with corporate lobbying and since legislatures and the congress almost never institute anything revolutionary without being pushed into it by angry voters, legislation is not the way either.

It is obvious that appealing to the public for a “grass roots” type of revolution is the answer. It is human nature for people to want to do things in their own way. But if people are truly interested in solving a problem—rather than solving it only in a way that they devise—they will honestly and carefully examine any proposal that has a chance of being effective in reaching the goal.

Cleckler’s research revealed no book now available which proposes a specific and simple spelling system and a way to incorporate that system into our American culture. His book does both.

Sir James Pitman’s research conclusively showed that an unknown but substantial portion of students—even some of our brightest students—will never become fluent readers with our present spelling system. Those who fail to learn to read with our present spelling can only become literate with a year or more of intensive one-on-one training with a private tutor. A year of reading instruction will only bring non-readers to an eighth grade education level, which is inadequate qualification for most jobs.

The one-grapheme-for-one-phoneme spelling system Cleckler developed is extremely easy to learn. In fact, numerous people have been able to read his spelling system with only a few stumbles over words. This is true even though they did not know the spelling system! This is possible because the 23 letters and the 15 two-letter combinations he chose to represent each of the phonemes are the most-used spelling of that phoneme in English, or the way people expect that spelling to be pronounced.

Here is the reason for Cleckler’s proposal: his research has proven conclusively that people can communicate perfectly well with only thirty-eight English phonemes, and it is very obvious that it is far easier for a person to learn to spell thirty-eight sounds than to learn the one “correct” spelling for all twenty thousand or more words in their vocabulary! People who can read English can learn this spelling system in ten minutes or less, after which there will be very few stumbles over words.

Cleckler’s book, Let’s End Our Literacy Crisis (American University & Colleges Press, an imprint of American Book Publishing, $24.95) explains the details of ending our literacy crisis and includes extensive reference notes showing sources proving the facts presented in the book and in this website. It is available in selected bookstores and libraries, from www.Amazon.com, and at a discounted price of $23.70 from American Book Publishing’s marketing website, www.pdbookstore.com. A companion volume, Let’s End Our Literacy Crisis Workbook (DMT Publishing, $19.95, including shipping and handling) provides additional information about the English language and teaching materials for students and teachers. It is available by clicking the button at the bottom of this page.

Cleckler states, “I do not know if my spelling system will be adopted world wide. But I do know this: it is the right way to end our literacy crisis. Nothing attempted for almost a century—since the problem became obvious—has had any significant effect on literacy. Anyone who thinks that my proposal is too extreme has not seen all of the details in my book proving my proposal is the best way to end illiteracy—they do not see the complete picture. My proposed system is the easiest and best way to solve our problems because it is logical, easy to learn, and it will save money in the long run.”

How This Proposal Saves Money

Cleckler’s proposed reading textbooks will consist of children’s classic literature transliterated into his spelling system. A very simple computer data-base program can do the transliteration. One such program is expected to be available in early 2007. With a little familiarization, almost anyone will be able to read English and simultaneously write or type in the new spelling system, almost as fast as they could copy the English version. The reading textbooks will not only be much more interesting to the students, developing in the students a love for reading, they will not have to be replaced until they physically wear out—as opposed to the present five years or so, as each new theory of teaching reading is developed.

Much more “money-saving,” however, is the fact that since students will learn to read in the first half of first grade, they can begin studying subjects most of which are now started in fourth grade or later. Moving numerous classes down two or three grades will, at long last, make the schooling of our students more competitive with the schooling in other countries.

Why Is Illiteracy Still a Problem?

English Illiteracy hasn’t ended because people don’t understand or believe the following:
(1) the extent, seriousness, and costs of illiteracy mentioned above,
(2) the great increase in the need for literacy: few manual labor jobs remain,and the world is rapidly becoming flatter, economically speaking, as Thomas L. Friedman's excellent book, The Earth is Flat demonstrates. Because of vastly improved communication technologies, U.S. workers no longer compete only with other U.S. workers; they also must compete with anyone, anwhere in the world, who has the same technological abilities.
(3) the difficulty of reading English, compared to other languages, and
(4) the very great difficulty—due to human nature and the economic realities—of solving illiteracy through standard means (better textbooks, better teaching methods, etc.).
(5) History proves that the ways to solve problems are not always carefully researched. We would like to think that our leaders carefully analyze all practical solutions and choose the best solution, but far too often, decision makers assume the problem must be solved within non-existent limits. This is exactly what has happened with spelling reform. People have ignored spelling reform, assuming it is impossible or impractical—outside of acceptable limits of what can be considered—even though it is the logical and best solution. In the case of English illiteracy, a simple, phonemic spelling or spelling reform to achieve such a spelling is the only solution that has been proven in hundreds of languages other than English.
(6) No one is willing to upset the “status quo” by adopting the logical solution to cure illiteracy instead of continuing to fight symptoms of illiteracy. Although the consequences may be devastating, it requires less thought and less effort to just ignore a problem, so people often ignore a problem until almost everyone recognizes and admits that it is a crisis.

Overcoming Resistance

People can obviously find reasons to object to any change that they do not want to make, but here is the most important fact to know about spelling reform: every reasonable objection to spelling reform has been completely disproven.

It is well known that people resist change, but it is a self-defeating policy to believe that the English-speaking world is so self-absorbed in their own interests that they have no compassion for the problems and suffering of hundreds of millions of English-speaking illiterates around the world. When the masses learn (1) how extremely easy the proposed spelling system is, (2) that through their action—requiring less than an hour of their time—they can help solve the problem, and (3) when they understand that a new spelling system will not cause all books with the present spelling system to self-destruct, they will be willing to help.

When the publishers understand that during the interim period they will be able to sell books in both spelling systems, they will be eager to participate. The interim period is the twelve year period during which the new spelling system is being adopted, beginning in first grade and adding the next higher grade in school each year. Following the interim period, publisher will have many years to do marketing studies of which books can be profitably reprinted in the new spelling system.

English, A Global Language

Although Cleckler’s book was written about the United States, reading English in every country is adversely affected. If another country uses superior teaching methods, they may be able to teach students to read English in a little less time than is required in the U.S., but it will still take far longer than it would if a perfect one-grapheme-per-one-phoneme spelling system were used for every word.

More people around the world speak English than any other language—more than 1.3 billion. There are hundreds of millions of people around the world who use English as a second language to communicate with people who do not speak their native language. English is the only truly global language; “over two-thirds of the world’s scientists write in English; half of the world’s books are written in English.” English is the accepted communication in international aviation and sea-going vessels. Over half of all radio broadcasts are in English.

From a list of 166 nations, there are 220 official languages and 86 different official languages. Among these 86, only fifteen are used as an official language by more than one nation. Only four languages are an official language used by more than six nations: English, 47, French, 31, Arabic, 21, and Spanish, 20.

Some language groups have no written language, and some language groups are in nations which have the financial resources for only a small amount of native language written material. If these people cannot read English, their choice of reading materials is extremely limited and their nation’s educational system is severely hampered.

What Cleckler is proposing is very simple: spell our words the way they sound, but the justifying facts, are many, varied, and in some cases a little complicated. As a result, merely scanning Let’s End Our Literacy Crisis, may lead to wrong conclusions. This is because many will think the proposal is unneeded unless they see all of the details of the proposal and its benefits for both those who are and who are not functionally literate. If enough people read and implement the proposals in Let’s End Our Literacy Crisis, our literacy crisis will definitely and permanently end. Together, we can make it happen!

Show that your care--not only for your own unnecessary expenditures of $3700 or more each year but for the 90 million or more fellow-Americans and for hundreds of millions of English-speaking people worldwide who desperately want to learn to read English. Order the revolutionary book which will explain the very easy process by which you can begin this much-needed humanitarian process by clicking here.

If you need further information about this worthwhile humanitarian project, go to http://literacy-research.com or simply click here. In addition to the home page, this site has links to information about (1) the author; (2) about why most people do not know the extent and seriousness of English illiteracy; (3) a "test your knowledge of U.S. functional illiteracy" site with fourteen questions, the answer to which will no-doubt shock most of you; and (4) a very brief presentation of what is proposed. If you wish to visit any of these sites directly, you can find them by clicking on the underlined "here" which follows: (1) about the author here, (2) why you didn't know here, (3) test your knowledge here, and (4) the proposal here.

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Sincerely,
Taylor Townsend	A
Taylor Townsend	Bob C. Cleckler, B.S.Ch.E
Book Marketing	Author, Let's End Our Literacy Crisis
American University & Colleges Press	Founding Chairman
an imprint of American Book Publishing	Literacy Research Associates, Inc.
	A nonprofit educational corporation

P.S. The extent and seriousness of functional illiteracy are far worse than most of us have realized. Fortunately, the solution is far easier than any of us would have dared to dream. If hundreds of millions of English functional illiterates in the U.S. and around the world knew of the decision you are now facing—responding positively to this website—every one of them would plead with you. They would say, "Give us what may well be our last, best hope for relief from the serious problems stemming from our illiteracy."

P.P.S. Not only can you show compassion and help hundreds of millions of functional illiterates, you can save yourself significant and growing personal financial costs. Will this program work for you? You'll never know unless you click here, buy, read, and apply what you learn from Let's End Our Literacy Crisis.

P.P.P.S. For all those who want to teach (or find a teacher for) someone who cannot read, the Let's End Our Literacy Crisis Workbook will prove invaluable. It provides teacher and student guidelines and additional beginning reader materials. These materials are valuable since they do not have pictures and therefore reduce guessing to a minimum. This is of particular value to anyone who has struggled with conventional English spelling. It also contains a reproduction of the McGuffey's Primer, which was used successfully for many years in the 1800s and is one of the best-selling books of all time. The workbook also contains additional facts about English spelling and a large portion of the last chapter of Dr. Thomas Lounsbury's 1909 book, Spelling and Spelling Reform, which gives a devastating and scholarly rebuttal of all the common objections to spelling reform. The workbook is available as an E-book or as a hard copy. To receive the E-Book for only $5.00 click here.

To order as a 198 page 8-1/2 x 11 softcover book for only $19.95 (shipping charges are included in this price) click here.