Very often, we understand differences in literacy performance exclusively in terms of the skills that individuals bring to the literacy tasks they face. Drawing on a new, highly integrative theory of functional literacy--the text-task-respondent (TTR) theory--this article presents a set of seven literacy skills that are required for everyday…

This study addresses the age-old problem of integrating personal and disciplinary purposes for learning. Two groups of educators participated in online professional development in which each participant assessed an adult literacy learner. The assignment required participants to synthesize assessment data representing social-humanist and cognitive…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how Canadian adults living with limited literacy and chronic illness made meaning of their patient education experiences. The study used a hermeneutic phenomenological research design and employed three data sources over a nine-month period. Data was interpreted and analyzed as it was collected,…

In this article, I use a literature review to examine the nature of reading comprehension in adult literacy practice. I suggest that we need to better understand learners' sociocultural profiles and that we need to be clearer about commonly used vocabulary terms (such as background knowledge). I also suggest that we pay more attention to how…

Literacy coalitions have been organized in various settings, from small towns and cities to counties and states. Coalitions are alliances "created for the purpose of joint action [and] drawn together by common interests." Literacy coalitions promote the power and pleasure of reading and stimulate community conversations about literacy.…

This article examines the case of an adult reader who has developed literacy practices that represent a wide range of authentic, personally and professionally motivated purposes for reading and writing. Despite this wide range of literacy practices, however, and despite the opportunities they have opened for him, Joseph (his chosen pseudonym)…

As professional developers for the Adult Basic Literacy Education (ABLE) system in Ohio, the authors have focused their efforts over the last several years on more actively engaging adult basic education teachers as learners in the professional development they offer. By creating activities that engage teachers in active learning with their adult…

In 2006, this author decided to make multiple intelligences (MI)-inspired "activity menus" a regular part of her ESOL/Civics classes. She first tried this technique in a single class session to review what students had learned about industrialization, and it was a huge success. Since 2006, the author has introduced MI-inspired activity…

This study examines the relationship between TABE-R performance and performance on selected, more focused reading component tests after 42 hours of adult education classroom instruction. Specifically, measures of expressive vocabulary, reading fluency, sight word reading, and decoding were administered to 98 participants along with the TABE-R.…

We statistically examined the oral reading fluency of 295 adults with low literacy by analyzing total words read per minute and word error rates. We identified four fluency-ability groupings based on standardized assessments of reading-related skills (phonemic awareness, word recognition, vocabulary, comprehension, and general ability). Our…

In many adult literacy programs around the country, instruction emphasizes reading, but equal time is not given to the development of writing skills. Adult students are often reluctant to expose the difficulties they have with writing, difficulties which will be painfully apparent when they do write. With students who are reluctant to write,…

There are many readability tools that instructors can use to help adult learners select reading materials. We describe and compare different types of readability tools: formulas calculated by hand, tools found on the Web, tools embedded in a word processing program, and readability tools found in a commercial software program. Practitioners do not…

This study examined the reliability and validity of administering Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) to adult basic education (ABE) students. Ninety ABE participants were administered DIBELS measures, the Woodcock-Johnson III Broad Reading (WJ III BR) measures, and four orthographic ability tests. Since ABE students are a…

This study sought to create profiles of adult literacy and basic education (ALBE) instructors and their use of the Internet in their classrooms. I used Rogers' diffusion of innovations framework and results of a previous study to develop a 56-item survey. Twelve hundred surveys were distributed in 24 states; 219 were returned for a response rate…

In this study, we measure the impact of the services of a large Southern state's literacy resource center on the state's adult literacy programs. Too often, literacy resource centers are the "forgotten player" in the field of adult literacy, being omitted from policy discussions. The findings from this study indicate that the services of…