The goal of this study was to describe how underlying vocabulary knowledge manifests into vocabulary usage, and in turn, how usage predicts writing quality among adult basic education (ABE) learners. ABE learners were administered tasks that measured vocabulary knowledge, in the forms of both vocabulary breadth and depth. Participants were also…

Inferencing skills uniquely contribute to the reading comprehension skills of older grade-school and college students. Evidence also suggests that children's reading component skills, such as decoding and language comprehension, differentially contribute to various reading comprehension assessments. However, additional research is needed to…

Adult Basic Education programs are under pressure to develop and deliver instruction that promotes rapid and sustained literacy development. We describe a novel approach to a literacy intervention that focuses on morphemes, which are the smallest meaningful units contained in words. We argue that if you teach learners that big words are comprised…

The Adult Basic Education (ABE) population consists of a wide range of abilities with needs that may be unique to this set of learners. The purpose of this study was to better understand the relative contributions of phonological decoding and morphological awareness to spelling, vocabulary, and comprehension across a sample of ABE students. In…

Improvement in second-language (L2) perception has been posited to occur early in L2 learning when the L2 vocabulary is still small, whereas a large L2 vocabulary curtails perceptual learning (the perceptual assimilation model for SLA [PAM-L2]; Best & Tyler, 2007). This proposition is extended by suggesting that early L2 lexical development…

For this research, learners did extensive graded reading (EGR) with traditional graded readers, and they also interacted with short graded stories in the liberal arts and sciences (LAS). This study describes the purpose and format of the LAS stories used by hundreds of university students and adult learners in Japan. It summarizes the results of…

OPERATION ALPHABET 2 CONSISTS OF NINETY LESSONS FOR ADULTS LEARNING TO READ AND WRITE, IN TWO VOLUMES. PART ONE CONTAINS LESSONS ONE THROUGH 40. ALTHOUGH THE LESSONS ARE PLACED IN A SEQUENTIAL DEVELOPMENT, EACH VOLUME HAS ITS OWN TABLE OF CONTENTS AND GLOSSARY SO THAT THEY CAN BE USED EITHER SINGLY OR TOGETHER. EACH LESSON CONTAINS NEW WORDS, A…

OPERATION ALPHABET 2 CONSISTS OF NINETY LESSONS FOR ADULTS LEARNING TO READ AND WRITE, IN TWO VOLUMES. PART TWO CONTAINS LESSONS 41 THROUGH 90. ALTHOUGH THE LESSONS ARE PLACED IN A SEQUENTIAL DEVELOPMENT, EACH VOLUME HAS ITS OWN TABLE OF CONTENTS AND GLOSSARY SO THAT THEY CAN BE USED EITHER SINGLY OR TOGETHER. EACH LESSON CONTAINS NEW WORDS, A…

Included here are two appendixes to "Adult Education Literacy Instruction: A Review of the Research." Appendix A, "Adult Studies," contains: (1) Assessment Profiles; (2) Alphabetics; (3) Fluency; (4) Vocabulary; and (5) Comprehension. Appendix B, "Adolescent Studies," contains: (1) Alphabetics; (2) Fluency; (3) Vocabulary; and (4) Comprehension.…

THE 5,000 WORD FUNCTIONAL READING WORD LIST, COMPILED TO REFLECT THE PRESENT AND IMMEDIATE FUTURE READING NEEDS OF THE AVERAGE ILLITERATE AMERICAN ADULT, EMPLOYS BASIC WORDS GATHERED FROM SUCH SOURCES AS FEDERAL GOVERNMENT PAMPHLETS, MENUS, NEWSPAPERS, COMIC BOOKS, APPLICATION BLANKS, AND RELIGIOUS TRACTS. THE LIST IS DIVIDED INTO FOUR PARTS--THE…

Cuyahoga Community College's (CCC) Unified Technologies Center (UTC) collaborated with three Cleveland area manufacturing companies in a workplace literacy project. The project provided job-related mathematics and communications programs for 302 employees who needed basic skills upgrading to improve their job performance. The project…

COMPETENT LITERACY EDUCATION INVOLVES THE CONTINUOUS DIAGNOSIS AND CORRECTION OF DEFICIENCIES. THROUGH FORMAL AND INFORMAL DIAGNOSTIC PROCEDURES AND OBSERVATION, TEACHERS LOCATE SPECIFIC NEEDS AND DEFECTS AND THEN APPLY SPECIFIC TECHNIQUES TO MEET THOSE NEEDS AND CORRECT OR WORK AROUND THOSE DEFECTS. TO HELP TEACHERS LOCATE TECHNIQUES APPROPRIATE…

This set of learning modules was developed during a project to deliver workplace literacy instruction to individuals employed in the more than 50 businesses related to the activities of the Port of Baltimore. It is intended to help employees of port businesses improve their spelling and vocabulary. The first module is a preassessment designed to…

An external evaluation was conducted of the Workplace Literacy Program at Chinatown Manpower Project, Inc., which provided oral and written job-specific instruction in English as a second language to Chinese garment workers. The program was designed for underemployed garment industry workers with low English proficiency, including seamstresses,…

This final report documents the development of a workplace literacy program for 100 employees of the Geriatric Authority of Holyoke, Massachusetts (GAH), a major nonprofit nursing home and rehabilitation facility. It describes how GAH employees received instruction in English as a Second Language, adult basic education, and General Educational…