[AAACE-NLA] Advocacy for Adult Literacy Research

[Thomas Sticht]

Advocacy for Adult Literacy Research

The Summer 2003 issue of American Educator (vol. 27 No. 2), the
professional journal of the American Federation of Teachers, is now
available from www.aft.org. This issue carries a letter to the editor
which consists of an abridged version of a message I posted to the
AAACE-NLA list in April of this year. It ends with a message advocating
for adult literacy research. This message will reach over a million
readers. The letter follows. Tom Sticht

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Overcoming The Fourth-Grade Plunge

In the Spring 2003 issue of the American Educator, E.D. Hirsch, Jr. and
Andrew Biemiller cite research by my colleagues and me on the need to
develop oral comprehension as a foundation for reading comprehension.

What I find particularly interesting is that the research cited  was done
to better understand adult reading education, not childhood reading. 
Almost 30 years ago, to aid in the better understanding of adult literacy
issues, colleagues and I wrote Auding and Reading: A Developmental Model
[auding refers to learning by listening] to provide a summary and
synthesis of how the "typical child," (a theoretical abstraction of
course)  born into our literate society grows up to become literate in the
judgment of other adults. This was done to provide a frame of reference
for better understanding  how it is that some children, unlike the
"typical child," grow up to be less than adequately literate in the
judgment of other adults and might benefit from participating in an adult
literacy program.

Auding and Reading offered guidance for adult reading instruction that
presaged the present guidance in the American Educator for K-12 education.
For instance, on page 122 of Auding and Reading we stated the need for:

 "methods for improving oral language skills
as foundation skills for reading. In this regard,
it would seem that, at least with beginning or
unskilled readers, a sequence of instruction in
which vocabulary and concepts are first introduced
and learned via oracy skills would reduce the
learning burden by not requiring the learning of
both vocabulary and decoding skills at the same time.
It is difficult to see how a person can learn to
recognize printed words by "sounding them out"
through some decoding scheme if, in fact, the
words are not in the oral language of the learner.
Thus an oracy-to-literacy sequence of training
would seem desirable in teaching vocabulary
and concepts to unskilled readers."

Auding and Reading goes on to discuss concepts of automaticity in
decoding, which underlie fluency of decoding in both auding and reading
and explain why it is important to develop fluency (automaticity) of
decoding.

There remains a need for further understanding of the life-span changes
that affect reading. The fact that adults change across the life span
argues for more research to better understand literacy development in
adulthood beyond what we have learned to-date and what we can glean from
studying the literacy development of children. Interestingly, as American
Educator illustrates, what new learning we acquire about adult literacy
development across the life span may have additional, important
implications for K-12 literacy education. This adds weight to the
importance of policies that emphasize the need for research on adult
literacy education


Thomas G. Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education
El Cajon, Calif.