[AAACE-NLA] Modernization Thesis and Newspapers

[Thomas Sticht]

Andrea: Thanks for the kind words, I'll keep on truckin'.

Merle Ayres  wrote: "I would like to read some of your books. Could you
list at least three of your favorites. Some others may be interested on
how this ties in with todays adult literacy."

Thanks for your interest, Merle. Here are some favorites by decade of
which  I have been either senior author or editor.
Tom Sticht

1970s:
(1974) Auding and Reading: A Developmental Model. Alexandria, VA: Human
Resources Research Organization. Out of print but available on
interlibrary loan at many university libraries. Given the interest in
reading in adult literacy education today this book is relevant.  It was
the first (and only as far as I know) book within the area of adult
literacy to present language and Piagetian thought development concepts
together with cognitive science ideas (e.g., a human cognitive system of
sensory information store, working memory, long term memory;  automaticity
for fluency in reading ; importance of the conceptual or knowledge base in
reading; etc.) to describe a theoretical model of literacy development
from childhood to adulthood and to evaluate  the model by testing  four
hypotheses derived from it. It has an extensive review of research
regarding the oracy to literacy transfer (e.g., enhancing reading
comprehension through listening) with implications for adult literacy
education.

(1975) Reading for Working: A Functional Literacy Anthology. Alexandria,
VA: Human Resources Research Organization. Out of print but available for
purchase online at www.amazon.com or www.addall.com. This introduced
concepts and methods underpinning the development of workplace literacy
programs such as job and task analysis for determining the literacy
demands of jobs (what became known as literacy task analysis); a special
readability formula (FORCAST) for determining the reading difficulty
levels of job materials, and the development of job-related reading
programs in place of general literacy programs for the situations in which
the rapid development of job-related reading skills is desired (e.g., as
in welfare to work programs).

1980s
(1987) Cast-off Youth: Policy and Training Methods from the Military
Experience. New York: Praeger. This book reviews research on the
performance of hundreds of thousands of low aptitude, low literate
personnel in the military services and concluded that contrary to claims
being made, over 80 percent of those predicted to be failures were
actually successful in their work. It also reviews 50 years of research on
technical training and literacy education in the armed services and
formulated the principles of Functional Context Education which were
incorporated into the National Workplace Literacy Program of the late
1980s and early 1990s.

1990s
(1992) The Intergenerational 	Transfer of Cognitive Skills: Volume I:
Programs, Policies, and Research Issues.  	Norwood, NJ: AblexPublishing
Corporation.
(1992). The Intergenerational Transfer of Cognitive Skills: Volume 2:
Theory and Research in Cognitive Science. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing
Corporation.
These two volumes present early programs of family literacy, and chapters
by noted researchers on concepts, findings, and policy related to the
intergenerational transfer of literacy from parents to children.

Recognizing the dire financial straits that most adult literacy educators
are in, and taking advantage of new communication technolgies, since the
late 1990s and up to now I have mostly written reports, some book length,
that are available for free online at the www.nald.ca site in Canada. You
can go there and look under Full Text Documents searched by S for Sticht
and find a couple of dozen papers and reports that present a lot of
information not available anywhere else including:

(1994, February). Adult Literacy in the United States: A Compendium of
Quantitative Data and Interpretive Comments with copies of items from 
every major adult literacy assessment since World War I and lots of
information about quantitative measures of adult literacy.

(1997, April). Functional Context Education-1997. Workshop Resource
Notebook. El Cajon, CA: Applied Behavioral & Cognitive Sciences, Inc. This
summarizes Functional Context Education principles, provides a
socio-cognitive science basis for literacy and its development, and gives
case studies of the application of FCE to adult literacy program design.

(1998, April). Moving Adult Literacy Education From the Margins to the  
Mainstream of Educational Policy and Practice. Paper presented at the
International Conference on How Adults Learn. Washington, DC. This is a
paper advocating for recognizing the Adult Education and Literacy System
of the United States as a third component of public education along with
k-12 and higher education.