Beyond 3Rs to learning within political action to functional literacy to life skills, the discourse on adult literacy has primarily been defined by civil society organizations. This article presents thoughts on adult literacy programs coming from educators and advocates and the underlying dilemmas of autonomy and collaboration with government for…

Describes the rationale, development, and administration of the test used for measuring levels of achievement in functional literacy in Guyana. Draws attention to the difficulty of attracting funding for literacy programmes from international aid agencies, given the inflated adult literacy rate that is reported for Guyana in international…

The purpose of the 1973 Pilot Literacy Project (Victoria, Australia) was to explore the nature of the problem of nonmigrant adults who had attended school but who considered themselves illiterate or functionally illiterate, to discover what sort of people were illiterate and to what extent, and to examine home influences and educational…

Findings and recommendations of the New York State Senate Committee on Investigations and Taxes are provided from an examination of adult illiteracy in New York State to estimate its extent and cost, to evaluate existing efforts, and to develop new approaches to reduce it. Findings show that there are approximately 2,040,000 functionally…

In Malawi, adult literacy deserves immediate attention in order to promote health, family planning, and productivity. While policy commitment for adult literacy promotion has not been lacking, intensified action has been. In 1979 the government accepted the Unesco Mission Report to undertake a functional literacy program on the successful…

The Farmers Training and Functional Literacy Programme, initiated by the government of India in 1968, was an effort to translate into practice the concept of linking education (not only vocational training) to development, particularly for increasing production. The project, a joint enterprise of three government ministries, provides participating…

The Literacy for Health program was a yearlong project to develop and test a curriculum combining literacy skills and health knowledge to help young inner-city adults develop the literacy skills needed to interpret written health information and gain the information needed to maintain their health. The project was a partnership between health…

After Botswana became independent of British rule in 1966, a series of five-year plans for economic development were written and put into action. Education was always seen by development planners as essential for development; by 1977, the government was promoting education for human resource development. Every child in the country was to be given…

This booklet contains 29 articles about literacy that originally appeared in newspapers across Canada during September 1987. Many are based on the extensive findings of a national literacy survey of 2,398 Canadian adults commissioned by Southam Inc. The survey provided the first real statistics about the state of literacy in the country;…

The Workplace Education Initiative was created in Massachusetts to provide workers with the opportunity to develop basic literacy skills, to increase employer and union awareness of the extent of functional illiteracy among workers as well as its cost, to develop a number of partnership models that link the acquisition of basic education skills…

This special report is a look at illiteracy across Canada and in Saskatchewan. It includes stories by Peter Calamai, a national correspondent with Southam News, and by Regina Leader-Post reporters Kevin O'Connor, Zena Olijnyk, Ron Petrie, and Beverley Spencer. The publication also includes stories by the Canadian press. Calamai's stories are the…

This study describes efforts by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) to promote literacy among six language groups of northern Ghana during the years 1972-1979. The report is organized into three parts. Part I provides general background for an understanding and evaluation of what took place. It first describes the national and local setting…

The New Jersey Adult Reading Project was a state project involving more than 500 New Jersey adult educators from 98 adult education programs around the state. The primary objective of the project was to develop a competency-based adult reading management system that would allow program completers to achieve the following goals: continue their…

Discusses problems facing developing nations in achieving UNESCO's goal of equality of educational opportunity. Mentions continuing inequality in literacy rates between developed and developing countries, and between the sexes. Describes functional illiteracy. Blames lack of progress on rates of demographic growth, pace of educational expansion,…

The Roosevelt University Humanities Enrichment Program tries to acknowledge the adult part of adult literacy. Its instructional materials are of interest and value to the adult student and, therefore, provide incentives for reading and discussion instead of serving merely as skill-building exercises. The materials are drawn from literature,…