While elementary teachers encourage students to monitor their own reading and give them strategies to comprehend the text and build their vocabulary, middle school teachers stop modeling and encouraging these strategies but still expect that students are cognizant of metacognition and strategies. As a result, more students are entering college…

This article argues that we have lost the plot in South African reading education. To find it, we need to move beyond the predominant mode of reading as oral performance, where the emphasis is on accuracy and pronunciation, to reading as comprehension of meaning in text. While reading research in South Africa has been conducted mainly in school…

This article reports the results from a randomized control field trial that investigated the impact of an enhanced decoding and spelling curriculum on the development of adult basic education (ABE) learners' reading skills. Sixteen ABE programs that offered class-based instruction to Low-Intermediate-level learners were randomly assigned to either…

This newsletter, published five times a year, features articles on issues of concern to adult, family, and youth literacy practitioners, as well as recommended resources, announcements, and teaching strategies. This issue contains: (1) Using a License to Drive Improvement: Professional Development in Massachusetts (Jon Steinberg); (2) Building…

In this article, the author shares her journey with evidence-based reading instruction. Her experience with evidence-based reading instruction (as the adult basic education coordinator at Windham Adult Education in Windham, Maine) has been a journey of change both professionally and programmatically, and the students at Windham Adult Education are…

Argues that a successful adult basic education program should recognize the differences between younger students and adults, provide a setting in which adults' dignity is not threatened, carefully diagnose each adult's needs, and prescribe and implement a program to meet those needs. (FL)

Offers a selected annotated bibliography of methods and materials for teachers working in an Adult Basic Education (ABE) setting; part two will deal with programs and approaches. (Author)

Advice from a teacher of reading via audiotapes includes the following: encourage positive attitudes, explain the purpose of activities, provide models, use relevant texts, encourage chunking, provide cues for prediction, and use humor where appropriate. (SK)

Argues that requiring student input and responsibility is an effective method for teaching reading to adults. (RB)

Several studies have shown that repeated readings improve reading fluency and comprehension. (MKM)

Describes how pornographic books were used in a successful three-month program designed to teach 15 low-income adult males how to read. (DD)

Although word lists have been proven statistically useful in teaching adults to read, the eleven percent of words which do not appear on these lists must also be introduced. (KS)

Making adults aware that they regularly pick out main ideas in their everyday lives makes it easier for them to do it in reading. (DD)

Describes how, by understanding the political dimensions of reading, Paulo Freire developed materials that enabled adults to learn to read in 30 to 40 hours; this article is based primarily on Paulo Freire's "Education for Critical Consciousness," Seabury, 1973. (Author/JM)

Suggests that the teaching of reading and writing to adults is difficult but not impossible, especially with a carefully planned and executed program; outlines four sequential stages of such a program. (JM)