Reading and Comprehension
The Rita Welsh Adult Learning Center was founded in 1979 to address the problem of adult illiteracy among people who worked in support positions – custodial, food service, security, landscaping, and so forth – at the College of William and Mary. Over time, the name of the program was changed to Literacy for Life and the focus shifted to providing support to immigrants who need to learn English in order to be successful in the United States. However, a recent report referenced by Literacy for Life on its Facebook page shows that the problem of low literacy among adults in American – not just among immigrant adults – is still with us.
The 19-page document (read it here) is intended to lay out the dimensions of the problem – creating better ways of defining the problems that adult learners and adult educators are dealing with and then suggesting ways of addressing them. Here are some questions the document tries to answer:
What skills are we talking about? And what should we call them?
Who are the potential partners who can benefit from adult basic/foundational skills services?
How has the adult basic skills problem been quantified and presented?
What are the implications of these skills limitations for both basic-skills-challenged individuals and the social contexts/institutions they interact with?
It concludes with suggestions for how advocates might move forward with developing a better problem statement and provides a draft statement for advocates to consider and adapt.
The document presents some preliminary answers to these questions.
What skills are we talking about? And what should we call them?
While the term “adult illiteracy” is still commonly used to describe the problem that adult basic skills education efforts try to solve, many experts and practitioners see it as an overly narrow and anachronistic term that doesn’t accurately describe the skills we should be focusing on. Alternative terms such as “basic skills,” “foundational skills,” and others are now commonly used to capture the broader range of skills (i.e., oral and written language [speaking and listening, reading and writing], numeracy [applied basic mathematics], digital skills, research, collaboration, and other abilities) that adults need to communicate and solve problems in their roles in work, family, community, and lifelong learning contexts.
Focusing solely or primarily on “reading” and using the term “literacy” tends to skew discussions of the problem in inaccurate, misleading directions. Such a narrow concept of basic skills doesn’t reflect the actual needs of basic-skills-challenged adults and of the other stakeholders they live and work with or decades of research in the field. Discussions of the broader range of “adult basic skills” should also make it clear that there are multiple levels of ability (e.g., novice, intermediate, advanced) within each of those foundational skills that learners might need to develop.
Who are the potential partners who can benefit from adult basic/foundational skills services?
Designing any customer-focused system should be based on a clear understanding of who that system is intended to serve (or “who are our customers?”). Given the large numbers of stakeholders who have—or might have—an interest in the basic skills of U.S. adults, the partners of adult basic skills services might be divided into two major categories: primary partners and other partners, as outlined below:
Primary partners: Basic-skills-challenged adults and out-of-school youth with diverse backgrounds, life challenges, interests, roles, and strengths
Other partners: Groups and individuals who have an interest in an adult population that has necessary basic/foundational skills.
Healthcare providers whose basic-skills-limited patients have a hard time benefiting from healthcare services
Employers who recognize that their employees lack basic skills that allow them to adapt to a changing workplace
Prison re-entry centers that are concerned that returning inmates often lack foundational skills that would allow them to thrive once they are released from incarceration
How has the adult basic skills problem been quantified and presented?
The document goes into some detail in its effort to answer this question, but the basic conclusion is that we have not done this well or consistently. The purpose of this publication is not to show how this problem has been solved but to suggest that it is difficult to evaluate the success of efforts to fix the problem of adult illiteracy because the problem is poorly defined.
What are the implications of these skills limitations for both basic-skills-challenged individuals and the social contexts/institutions they interact with?
For individuals, gaps in basic skills can make it difficult to carry out important functions for work, family, civic, and lifelong learning.
For society, the presence of basic-skills-challenged adults in a community can limit:
employers’ ability to hire, train, and promote employees to perform a wide range of functions;
the efficiency of healthcare providers to help patients protect their health and that of family members and navigate complex healthcare systems;
efforts to break the cycle of criminal behavior and re-incarceration and ensure public safety;
the ability of schools to help parents support their children’s literacy development and overall academic success;
economic development agencies’ efforts to attract employers and family-sustaining jobs to the community;
the ability of democratic institutions (e.g., boards of elections, legislative bodies, mayors’ offices, political parties, advocacy organizations, and labor unions) to communicate with and serve their communities;
retailers’ ability to interact with customers;
media companies’ ability to reach potential audiences.
What factors contribute to these basic skills limitations?
Factors that block adults from developing basic skills in childhood:
For US-born adults, these factors include the quality of their schools, community or family support for academic success, learning disabilities, or other types of disabilities
For foreign-born adults, the same factors come into play, but they face additional challenges if they are not literate in their native language or if their native language does not use the Latin alphabet
Factors that block adults from developing necessary basic skills in adulthood:
Personal obstacles – including the following:
a lack of awareness of where to find an appropriate program;
a remote location, a lack of transportation, or a lack of access to digital technologies, any of which can make access to a suitable program difficult;
a health problem or disability;
having to prioritize other duties for work or family;
a negative history with an adult education program or with education during their younger years, making them less willing to try to re-engage with adult education;
family or societal attitudes and structures that discourage potential learners from trying to do something about the limitations of their basic skills.
Systemic obstacles within adult education, including:
At the program level – long waitlists, restricted operating times, inaccessible locations
At the policy and funding levels – there is never enough money to provide the services that are needed, and policy choices often support quantity of services (easy to measure and document) over the more intangible quality and utility of services.
This document raises important questions about the problem of adult illiteracy and poses the questions that must be answered to solve these problems. It doesn’t solve the problems, but it didn’t purport to do that.
This report has made me think more about the problem of adult illiteracy – not in the most basic terms but in its more nuanced terms. Literacy involves not only reading words but understanding ideas. Our politics, in particular, have been poisoned by a lack of logical thinking. Logical thinking has to be considered part of literacy – being able to pronounce words fluently is a very minor part of understanding concepts.
Wikipedia actually has an entry on “Political Literacy.” It says that political literacy includes an understanding of how government works and of the important issues facing society, as well as the critical thinking skills to evaluate different points of view. Many organizations interested in participatory democracy are concerned about political literacy. Jefferson most famously noted that an educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people (this is a paraphrase; it’s not clear if Jefferson actually said or wrote these exact words, but it is an accurate statement of his beliefs).
Social media encourages us all to engage in discussions on topics we know little about. Over the past several years we have all become trial attorneys, appellate judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, epidemiologists, psychiatrists, military planners, foreign policy experts, and constitutional scholars. A dip into the Google machine and Wikipedia gives us the vocabulary to engage in discussions of complex topics, and provides us with the illusion that we understand everything. We can read the words but we don’t know the meaning.