AS I READ

Some people are avid readers others aren't. Some cultures predispose to reading others don't.  Age, gender, background, life events, and education all affect our literacy.
According to UNICEF "Nearly a billion people, two-thirds of them women, will enter the 21st century unable to read a book or write their names."
I take it they mean in their mother tongue, not English, as I cannot read a book or write my name in Mandarin Chinese, the world's second largest language. Bulgaria has a relatively high literacy rate, with the exception of our Roma communities.  They speak Romany, a language with few surviving poems and folktales written in Cyrillic and Latin.
Refusing to learn Bulgarian, with the purpose of reading and writing, they are bracketed as illiterate. Refusing to be educated in Chinese, I too am considered illiterate in that community. I am a fool to think I'm not part of this statistc. My reading and writing skills in Spanish would certainly be considered inadequate.  I mentioned after my five-year stay, I can still only write simple texts and read with a dictionary.  To me it is a vast world of castellano argot made intelligible only by my husband's persistent instruction, and interaction with family and friends.
English also helps.
Why do I rely on English to such an extent? I suppose, as most people, I would like to be monolingual, and not have to communicate in three different languages in order to be understood or survive economically.  Generally speaking English is a universal language.  It is easy to learn and speak.  It has a simple but complete Latin alphabet, as opposed to the complex Chinese characters. It provides easy access to all current information on and offline, which in more complex indigenous languages, would become available at a much later date.  It is a joy to be able to read modern literature in the language it was originally written. Bulgarian writers, due to economic circumstances, do not write in Bulgarian. There are surviving classical texts, and translations of foreign literature, but we do not have modern literature, as such.
(Which leads me to doubt our high literacy rate, but that would make a good new entry.)
 
From a teacher's point of view.  Motivate your students with adequate texts.  Even if they come from a culture where disciplined reading or reading for pleasure is low, they'll come around.  They all appreciate a challenge if it's easy to meet, or there's a prize in the end.  Expose them to texts they are used to seeing in the primary language.  Introduce them to websites.  Use audio and multimedia.  Watch the movie.  None of them said "NO" to Harry Potter, after watching some excerpts.
 
Build a bridge between the primary culture and the target culture.
To make them love a topic, you have to be excited about it yourself.
 
Help boost literacy.  Learn a Chinese Character a day, or at least the Cyrillic alphabet.
RESPECT