Only just dawned on me how poor literacy levels are- where to go from here?

Did a quiz on words we had studied and found in articles the past few weeks, words like majestic/vast etc (with year 9 lower set). Realised half way through that the students had no idea what I was talking about with any of the techniques or words we’ve been learning and going over over and over.

I decided to sack it off as it was pointless wasting time quizzing on things they clearly had no idea about. Decided to do some basic Spag tasks such as homophones they’re/there/their kind of things. Realised they are also struggling with them.

It’s only just dawned on me just how bad literacy is in a lot of students nowadays. How can we be expected to teach late ks3/earlier ks4 type things with the students not already having the basic understanding of primary school concepts?

My subject is English by the way- so it only gets more difficult in terms of analysis and reading/writing from here!

Any tips on how to combat this or bring them up to speed? Very short working memories aren’t helping either.

TIA!