Offers suggestions on how to use the newspaper to teach students how to follow directions. (SRT)

Provides precise definitions of the terms literacy and basic skills and shows the natural connection between them. (HOD)

Focusing on activities that can be directly taught as "survival language situations," this journal (1) evaluates what school critics mean by "survival English," (2) demonstrates that teachers can easily pay attention to "survival"-oriented language, and (3) argues that a comprehensive English course enables students…

An adult basic education curriculum is presented, designed to raise the competencies of adults in the basic areas of oral and written communications, arithmetic, social sciences, occupational planning (including development of occupational concepts and attitudes) and development of self. Basic area skills and activities are presented in three…

The Survival Skills Center described in this report operates at Columbia College, CA, to provide individualized instruction in basic reading, writing, and math skills using a series of modules which focus on problems commonly encountered in everyday life. After discussing the need for such instruction among nontraditional students, the paper…

The Communication Experience Approach (CEA), a modification of the Language Experience Approach to teaching reading, involves the use of group activities designed to help functionally illiterate persons learn basic communication skills. This paper first discusses six distinct processes in the CEA: setting a specific purpose for communicating,…

Designed to meet the needs of older nonreaders, this booklet provides teaching suggestions and classroom activities for functional or survival reading skills. The topics covered include using the telephone; figuring the cost of a purchase; following directions; survival vocabulary for public signs; vocabulary for the medicine chest; reading the…

Discusses the contributions that consumer and homemaking education make towards improving students' basic skills. These skills include verbal (discussing consumer issues, family relations, child development); reading (product labels, magazine articles, newspapers); writing (reports, notes, term papers); mathematics (budgets, recipe ingredients,…

This book aims to meet the needs of students who are beginning to learn English and to help them reach such goals as gaining an education, finding a job, continuing on to higher education, or functioning better in everyday life in the United States. The book stresses the basic language skills of vocabulary development, grammar, reading, writing,…

This booklet along with six others comprises a curriculum guide developed for adult education supervisors and teachers of undereducated workers or job seekers whose inability to develop the skills and obtain the knowledge necessary to meet the requirements of the working world are primarily due to a lack of competence in reading and math skills.…

This booklet is intended to help adults master the basic and life skill vocabulary needed to meet the simple communication demands of daily life. It is designed to assist adult basic education (ABE) teachers in the implementation of a competency-based learning system that emphasizes the integration of basic and life skills learning. The booklet…

This book contains more than 200 one-page exercises designed to give adults practice in basic reading and handwriting skills. The exercises are arranged according to the areas with which they deal: visual discrimination; letter recognition; manuscript practice and sequence; script practice; numeral writing; initial consonants; final consonants;…

Emphasizes understanding the social psychology of individual and community resistance to schooling in classes of adult students in job training programs. Points out that basic unit of educational organization should be the group of teachers, that classes should be organized as work groups which should share the tasks of education and everyday…

A mother of an adolescent daughter with blindness and learning disabilities focuses on how she helped her daughter improve reading and writing skills by finding a meaningful purpose for those skills in daily life. This article discusses early signs of learning problems, the learning environment, talking books, books in braille, technology,…

The basic skills activities in this booklet are intended for use by adult basic education (ABE) students who are parents or who otherwise interact with children. The lessons are constructed to be used first by ABE teachers or counselors with a parent and then by the parent and child at home. The lessons introduce concepts that children can learn…