In Germany, 6.2 million adults can not read and write German properly. For more than half of them - 52.6 percent - German is the mother tongue. This emerges from a study funded by the Federal Ministry of Education, from which the German Press Agency cited in advance. The study "LEO 2018 - Life with Low Literacy" will be presented this Tuesday in Berlin.
According to this, 47.4 percent of those affected have a migrant background and have learned a language other than German first. Of these 2.9 million people, just under 78 percent say they are able to read and write sophisticated texts in their native language.
In 2011, a total of 7.5 million people had only limited reading and writing skills - about 1.3 million more. This category includes all those who can read or write individual sentences, but do not understand coherent texts, not even shorter ones.
Federal Education Minister Anja Karliczek (CDU) called the decline a "success for our education system". But politics and society should not let up. Especially adults often have a lot of work to do to face the problem of reading and writing difficulties. More attention should be paid to people with a migrant background.
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According to the study, 62.3 percent of those affected, despite their literacy and literacy work. More than one in five does not have a school degree, another two-fifths have only a small degree.
Even those adults who understand coherent texts, but still can not read well and write only very incorrectly, there was an improvement: Here, the number of 13.4 million in 2011 to now 10.6 million people.
In the summer of 2018, around 7200 German-speaking adults between the ages of 18 and 64 years were interviewed for the study. For the survey, people had to speak enough German to be able to follow an approximately one-hour survey.