Background: Mature age admission at universities is increasing rapidly all over the world and Ghanaian universities, both private and public, are no exception. The language proficiency of the admitted mature students, especially in reading, is often low, which affects their comprehension abilities and academic work. Objectives: The purpose of the…

The goal of this study is to have a better understanding of today's general education development (GED) students so proper services and support can be provided to meet their needs. Through students enrolled in GED programs in a health science career pathway--focused city college, the study learned the students' employment status, career intention,…

This study aimed to explore the language difficulties faced by English diploma students and provide solutions to overcome them. The data collected in the form of a questionnaire administered to 39 female students were compared in percentages for closed-ended questions and thematically for open-ended ones. Results showed that diploma students…

Background: Good screening tools can be of immense value in educational counselling for adults. We report two studies where we explored the factor structure and discriminative power of the Adult Reading Questionnaire (ARQ) in different samples of young adults at risk for reading impairments. Method: The ARQ was designed to screen for literacy…

Although there is a wealth of literature on improving the reading skills of EFL learners at Saudi universities, very little work has been done on struggling readers in lifelong and continuous learning programs. To address the issue, this study seeks to explore the needs of struggling learners in reading comprehension classes. Interviews were…

This paper presents the process of co-design, co-production, piloting, evaluation and revision of an Integrated Digital Literacy and Language Toolkit for Vulnerable Migrant Students (VMs) in Higher Education (HE). The language element focuses on academic language skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking required for effective involvement…

This research compared the contributions of lexical inferencing, decoding, and listening comprehension to reading comprehension in Chinese-speaking learners of English as a second language (ESL) enrolled in university bridging programs in the U.S. and Chinese-speaking university learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in mainland China.…

Undoubtedly, it is every teacher's life quest to find the best way to teach; there are no universal formulas to accomplish that. A committed teacher is a life-long learner, which shows why being an educator is not an easy career. A teacher is indeed like a candle that lights the students' path as it consumes itself. Such abnegation comes at a high…

This edited collection presents a study of innovation in teaching, learning, assessment and teacher development practices in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The thirteen research-based chapters in this collection examine recent innovations in English language teaching, drawing on classroom, administrative and learning experiences from…

Millions of U.S. adults lack the literacy skills needed for most living-wage jobs. We investigated one particular comprehension process for these adults: generating predictive inferences. If a sentence says that someone falls from a 14th-story roof, a reader should infer almost certain death. On any test of comprehension, there are two dependent…

Defined as language, literacy and numeracy, and employability skills, foundation skills are essential for individuals to participate in further education, employment and wider society. Community education providers, such as community colleges, neighbourhood houses, faith-based organisations and adult learning associations, are key providers of…

This commentary offers a critique of literacy pedagogy that focuses solely upon a best practices approach to teaching and learning and argues for a relational pedagogy that relies upon diffractive thinking, reading, and writing.

The tenth annual Boston Opportunity Agenda Report Card takes a closer look at the impact of two years of pandemic on the achievement of students on key indicators from kindergarten through college and adult education. It finds mixed results for Boston's public and public charter school students, with some areas seeing much larger changes triggered…

Millions of adults in the United States lack the necessary literacy skills for most living wage jobs. For students from adult learning classes, we used a lexical decision task to measure their knowledge of words and we used a decision-making model (Ratcliff's, 1978, diffusion model) to abstract the mechanisms underlying their performance from…

Language centres in higher education are facing new challenges as they plan curricula for an increasingly diverse student body and undertake new tasks in support of the multiform internationalisation of universities. Continuing professional development clearly needs to be taken to a new level, and one way of doing this is to include research in a…