B. Helen Liu - 1 views
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In 1962, 77% of a Gallop Poll respondents said they had watched television the day before; in 1988, 91% admitted doing so. Nowadays "an average American spends at least three hours a day in front of a television set" (Glenn 223). Considering the impact of television on reading only in terms of time, conventional wisdom has it that television has a detrimental influence on the development of a person's literacy level simply because that people have allocated less time on reading. Thus it is not surprising for the general public to have the notion that Americans' reading habits are on the decline. Such view is reinforced by the popularity of such books as Jonathan Kozol's Illiterate America, in which Kozol states that more than one-third of American adults cannot read successfully. David Harman, the author of Illiteracy: A National Dilemma, observes that "more and more working members of mainstream America are found to be either totally illiterate or unable to read at the level presumably required by their job or their position in society."
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Many educators, educational policymakers, and individuals with public influence have suggested that television watching has indeed lowered the academic performance of school children, both in reading and writing, and in mathematics. Support for such assertions frequently appears on television screens. Although children may learn the meaning of some words from watching television, television viewing presumably lessens the time they spend on homework, reading books, listening to adult conversation, and other activities with greater potential (than watching television) for the development of vocabulary, a major component of an individual's literacy proficiency. The increase in television watching by adults may also have adversely affected their development and retention of vocabulary by decreasing such activities as reading and conversing.
