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…

This book is intended to assist literacy program administrators, coordinators, instructors, and volunteers in the design and implementation of literacy programs for homeless adults. Chapter 1 discusses barriers to instruction when serving homeless adults, including shelter environment, impermanence of location and opportunity, and the effects of…

This document reports the results of a study of literacy in Canada conducted for the Southam News in 1987. During the study, 2,398 Canadians were surveyed to determine the levels of literacy they possessed and how they coped in society if they were illiterate. The research methodology is based on an assessment of literacy conducted in 1985 by the…

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;…

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…

Most industrialized nations of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have entered a new economic era characterized by new industries, new forms of production and competition, and a much higher premium on skills. Those with low levels of literacy and basic workplace skills find it increasingly difficult to obtain or…

The bulk of this issue consists of five articles providing insight into various phases of adult continuing education. "The Meliorist Position as a Philosophic Base for Adult Education" (Gordon Clay Godbey) examines these questions about meliorism: should we accept as natural improvement of the human condition, the constant wars, the…

This special demonstration project was undertaken to field test and disseminate a curriculum entitled Emergency English for Refugees (EER). Designed to meet the immediate English language needs of pre- and non-literate adult refugees and immigrants, the EER is a 26-unit competency-based English-as-a-second-language (ESL) curriculum that deals with…

In 2000, approximately 877 million adults worldwide were illiterate and 113 million children did not attend school. More than two-thirds of those individuals lived in East and South Asia, and two-thirds were females. Functional illiteracy remains high in developed and developing nations alike. The reasons include weak training in how to teach…

A project was undertaken to develop a realistic survival skills curriculum in language arts for adult basic education (ABE) students that could be used with predischarge residents in institutions for mentally ill individuals in Pennsylvania. After identifying 28 predischarge residents at the Harrisburg State Hospital in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,…