Even Start Family Literacy Program is a three-part program serving thousands of children from birth to age seven. The federal program supplies parents with the training to be their child's first teacher; allows them to gain needed literacy skills and complete their own formal education; and provides a preschool for young children. Children gain at…

Notes that literacy practices of caregivers are the building blocks for establishing a home environment conducive to emergent literacy. Recommends practices to incorporate into family-telling experiences and suggests published stories that promote diversity and literacy. (HTH)

Suggests that juvenile offenders with poor literacy skills and a child to support need all the help they can get. Describes and examines a classroom at a juvenile residential facility. Finds that these juveniles must see themselves as readers, writers, and storytellers before they can carry literacy home to their own children. (RS)

At Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina, an innovative program promotes lifelong literacy skills for university physical-plant employees and, in turn, helps these adult learners support their children's education. Instructional activities link families through children's literature, work-related readings, and personal literature. To…

Discusses perceived shortcomings of current family literacy program models that too often: are conceived and implemented as a compensatory model; target only one child and one parent; do not effectively integrate adult education, literacy/ESL, or parent-child interaction time into programing; and that have a radically unstable funding base.…

Describes family literacy, examining how families are already read by teachers, researchers, policymakers, and the media and arguing that the rhetoric of family literacy has defined the family in somewhat pathological terms. The paper examines the continued pervasiveness of deficit discourses to describe families, noting why it prevails in the…

Explores issues arising from the long-standing theoretical and empirical attention to reading as a specifiable set of psychological processes, and the consequences of this attention for parents' and educators' deliberations and practices. Concludes that theories of reading need to deal fundamentally with the practices that learners, teachers and…

New perspectives on childhood learning are beginning to change the way we view the development of early literacy, which is progressively conceptualized as embedded in social practice. The recognition of the powerful influence of out-of-school learning prompts questions about ways of linking home and school practices. This article reports a…

This training guide was created by the National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy (NCSALL) to help connect research and practice in the field of adult education and family literacy. A Health and Adult Literacy and Learning (HALL)/NCSALL Health Literacy Study Circle+ is a professional development activity for adult basic education…

A large proportion of the UK adult population has very poor literacy and/or numeracy skills (see the 1999 Moser Report, the 2003 "Skills for Life" Survey and the 2006 Leitch report). In 1999, the Moser report found that approximately 20% of adults in England had severe literacy difficulties, whilst around 40% had some numeracy problems.…

Everyone knows how important it is to read to young children--but it is the "quality" of shared reading that really affects emergent literacy. How well are adults engaging and teaching children as they read together? How well are children listening and responding? The first and only tool to measure the quality of adult and child interactions…

Because of the important role played by community learning providers, Premier Ed Stelmach asked Canadian Minister of Advanced Education and Technology to increase support for community education and literacy programs. Community Adult Learning Councils and other community providers of adult literacy and family literacy programming are primarily…

When adult students arrive in the classroom, they can be at just about any level in their reading development, from beginning readers working on the fundamentals to more advanced readers ready to begin study for a high school level equivalency diploma. This Partnership for Reading publication summarizes the emerging principles and trends in adult…

Family literacy programs, of which there is no shortage, need to be examined to know "if" and "why" a program is successful. Family literacy programs, like any literacy programs, must be viewed from a critical reflective stance. This paper aims to describe one way of evaluating the effectiveness of family literacy programs. The…

The advent of welfare reform in the United States has provided new challenges in preparing adults to become economically self-sufficient. As one response to this challenge, the National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL) in Louisville, Kentucky began the Family Independence Initiative in 1997 to promote family literacy as one solution for assisting…