We employed self-paced reading and event-related potential measures to investigate how adults of varying literacy levels use sentence context information when reading. Community-dwelling participants read strongly and weakly constraining sentences that ended with expected or unexpected target words. Skilled readers showed N400s that were graded by…

We employed self-paced reading and event-related potential measures to investigate how adults of varying literacy levels use sentence context information when reading. Community-dwelling participants read strongly and weakly constraining sentences that ended with expected or unex- pected target words. Skilled readers showed N400s that were graded…

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…

Postsecondary institutions are finding more students without the literacy proficiency to study on the collegiate level, yet little research has been completed in the area of adult literacy instruction. Due to this deficiency, literacy instructors have relied on utilizing children's reading strategies which have proven ineffective in an adult…

This study's aim was to understand the relationship of the component skills of reading, such as word recognition, vocabulary, and spelling, to large-scale measures of literacy, such as the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) (Kirsch, Jungleblut, Jenkins, & Kolstad, 1993) and the closely related International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS)…

Society expects certain levels of literacy from its citizens. In addition, individuals have expectations for their own levels of literacy. In defining functional literacy, there is considerable disagreement over what can be expected of consumers, employees, and taxpayers. Empirical studies in Sweden attempting to establish criteria of functional…

This final performance report compares the goals and actual accomplishments of a project focused on establishing a basic, cooperative literary collection, with the specific goal of improving availability of and access to literacy materials for literacy providers and students. The project included coalition building, public awareness, basic…

Funded by the Bureau of Adult, Vocational, and Technical Education of the Office of Education, the Adult Performance Level (APL) study has as its objectives: to describe adult functional literacy in pragmatic, behavioral terms and to develop devices for the assessment of literacy which will be useful at a variety of operational levels. Two years…

In these publications of the National Reading Center, several organizations which aid illiterate adults in learning reading skills are described. The purpose, clients, activities, and programs are discussed for the National Association for Public Continuing and Adult Education (NAPCAE), American Library Association - Adult Service Division, Adult…

Twenty percent of adult Americans function only with difficulty with necessary every day literacy skills, almost two-thirds of the 800 million illiterate adults in the world are females, and the number of women who cannot read or write has risen steadily in the past 10 years. The inservice program described in this document involved a team of…

Attending this 1969 conference on adult basic education were representatives from not only the Ozarks and Appalachian regions but also areas ranging from southern New York State to Mississippi and Louisiana, west to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, and as far north as Illinois. Governor Winthrop Rockefeller spoke on "The Challenges of…

A staff development needs assessment survey was conducted by the Adult Literacy Resource Institute, in cooperation with other Boston-area programs providing basic education services for adults, to gather information on what users and potential users of the institute wanted in the areas of inservice teacher education, training, and staff…

This paper describes Literacy Independence towards Enabling, Responsibility, Attainment, Trust, and Excellence, a program for adult literacy learners that involves a comprehensive approach to development of competency in reading, writing, and oral language. Learners participate in a cooperative-learning experience in which they provide input…

This selective bibliography is one of nine documents compiled to provide titles and descriptions of useful and informative reading documents which were indexed into the ERIC system from 1966 to 1974. The 201 entries in this section of the bibliography concern adult education and are arranged alphabetically by author in one of the following eight…

This manual suggests solutions to frequent questions of adult basic education (ABE) and General Educational Development (GED) teachers. The sourcebook is organized into six major sections. The first section, General Questions, includes a potpourri of questions. The other five categories are Reading, English, Mathematics, Social Studies/Science,…