This ethnographic study employs a gender perspective to understand the motivations of eight women literacy learners participating in a village-based functional literacy programme in rural North-eastern Thailand. Field research took place over six months of periodic residence in a North-eastern Thai village, and involved participant observation,…

In the modern world, skimming through information quickly and finding the important nuggets of knowledge from amongst the information overload is an essential skill. One way to train oneself for this kind of literacy is reading on the internet, which requires continuous assessment of search results and specifying searches. In this article a…

A survey of 53 probation services in England and Wales and visits to 13 revealed unsystematic provision of literacy services in correctional rehabilitation, conflicting perspectives on how literacy should be defined and taught, and ambivalence about the role of probation officers as punitive or preventive. (SK)

A test measuring document, prose, and quantitative literacy of out-of-school youth in Guyana found that only 11% had high levels of functional literacy, a literacy rate much lower than usually reported. Failure to represent the situation accurately prolongs the lack of political will to deal with the issue. (SK)