Journal of research and practice for adult literacy, secondary, and basic education最新文献

This study sought to examine the pre-task planning and post-task revising practices of adults with low literacy and how those practices affect overall writing quality. Seventy-six adults with low literacy composed essays in response to a prompt and were given time for pre-task planning and post-task revising. Results showed that participants with higher planning skills were able to utilize planning and revising processes to increase the detail included in their compositions while potentially streamlining the language contained therein. Writers with lower planning skills, in contrast, focused on lower-level aspects of writing (e.g., word choice) and were unable to make use of the more demanding processes of planning and revising to improve their compositions. These findings suggest a hierarchical development of writing skills and the possibility of sacrifices in certain areas of the writing process as writers focus on other areas. Practical implications for practitioners are discussed.

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 of smaller components (i.e., morphemes), you will provide those students with the skills to figure out the meanings of new words. Research with children has demonstrated that teaching them about morphemes improves word recognition, spelling, vocabulary, and comprehension (Bowers & Kirby, 2009; Kirk & Gillon, 2009; Nunes, Bryant, & Olsson, 2003). Our hope is that this type of intervention will be successful with adult learners, too.

This study examined whether the spelling abilities of adults with low literacy skills could be predicted by their phonological, orthographic, and morphological awareness. Sixty Adult Basic Education (ABE) students completed several literacy tasks. It was predicted that scores on phonological and orthographic tasks would explain variance in spelling scores, whereas scores on morphological tasks may not. Scores on all phonological tasks and on one orthographic task emerged as significant predictors of spelling scores. Additionally, error analyses revealed a limited influence of morphological knowledge in spelling attempts. Implications for ABE instruction are discussed.

The goal of this study was to compare the literacy skills of adult native English and native Spanish ABE speakers. Participants were 169 native English speakers and 124 native Spanish speakers recruited from five prior research projects. The results showed that the native Spanish speakers were less skilled on morphology and passage comprehension tasks but were equally skilled on the phonology and vocabulary tasks. Morphology, coupled with phonology, was a stronger predictor of vocabulary and comprehension abilities for the native Spanish speakers, which suggests that instruction focused on morphology is likely to have a greater impact on this group.

Resilient readers are those who, despite their poor phonological decoding skills, have good comprehension abilities (Jackson & Doellinger, 2002). Thus far, these readers have been identified in college settings. The purpose of this study was to a) determine if this reader profile was present in a sample taken from an Adult Basic Education (ABE) population, and b) identify compensatory mechanisms these readers might use to better their reading comprehension. We administered a battery of tasks consisting of non-word reading, comprehension, fluency, and orthographic processing to a diverse sample of adults in ABE classes. Not only did we identify a group of resilient readers in this sample, we identified three other sub-groups: unskilled readers who had poor decoding and comprehension abilities, skilled readers who possessed good decoding and comprehension abilities, and a group of individuals who had good decoding skills but poor comprehension abilities. We found that the resilient readers and good decoders/poor comprehenders had better orthographic and fluency skills compared to the unskilled readers. However, these last two groups produced different error patterns on the orthographic and fluency tasks. We discuss the implications that these very different reader profiles have for ABE programs.