In September 2013, based on a national survey of state Adult Basic Education (ABE) directors or designates, Council for Advancement of Adult Literacy (CAAL) published "Stepping Up to ROI on Adult Education: A Survey of State Activity." This paper reported on the states' activity, from the perspective of the respondents, in collecting and…

This study aimed to describe home literacy (HL) activities of Spanish-/English-speaking children of low-socioeconomic status backgrounds and examine the relationship between HL and performance on standardized assessments. Parents of 65 dual-language learners (DLLs) in kindergarten completed an HL questionnaire. Parents reported an average of 17…

The California Department of Education (CDE) provides adult literacy services to one-fifth of adults enrolled in the Adult Education and Family Literacy Act (AEFLA) program in the United States. The adult education program addresses literacy needs of individuals by providing adults with the skills and knowledge necessary to (a) gain employment or…

Previous research examining the reading achievement of immigrant children has often grouped English learners into one broad category, referred to as ELs, thereby creating an "either-or" dichotomy regarding whether or not these students need school language supports. The present study examined the theoretical contention regarding the…

The present study examined how a six-week family literacy programme contributed to supporting the efforts 12 mothers living in a residential shelter were making to foster their preschool children's literacy development. We compared pre- and post-programme interviews to explore whether the mothers applied the literacy strategies discussed in the…

Roughly 350,000 refugees, over 90% of them Somali, lived in five sprawling camps in Dadaab, Kenya in 2015. In the Dadaab refugee camps, families had unique experiences of disability, education, women's roles, and involvement with International Non-Governmental Organization (INGO) programming. INGOs provided a variety of basic services including…

Adopting a Freirean perspective, the purpose of this autoethnography is to reframe the typical relationship between university educators and communities in poverty by highlighting the educative impact of such a community on a university professor's academic, cross-cultural critical and civic learning. By reframing communities in poverty as sources…

This study was designed to identify the specific aspects of parenting that underlie family literacy programs by using 87 parenting items from the Even Start Classroom Literacy Interventions and Outcomes (CLIO) study. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted using data from the first year of data collection (N = 1300) to determine the…

This article is framed by the notion of "educación" and how it influenced the narratives of resistance of 12 seasoned bilingual teachers (Solórzano &Yosso, 2002). Using an oral narrative approach, we share participants' descriptions of the connections between their "educación" within their families and communities and how…

One of the greatest challenges in literacy education is the ability to provide a practical environment for candidates to apply their knowledge, while still working with their peers and under close faculty supervision. One of the greatest needs of resource-stretched schools is the ability to provide students with additional help in literacy…

This ethnographic study presents findings of the literacy practices of Burmese refugee families and their interaction with a book distribution program paired with an intergenerational family literacy program. The project was organized at the level of Bronfenbrenner's exosystem (in "Ecology of human development". Cambridge, Harvard…

In this article, I draw on data from my qualitative dissertation study of the literacy practices of five families who resided in a homeless shelter to complicate the relationship between literacy, education, and inequality. Homelessness is examined through the lens of sponsorship to understand the differential access the families have to powerful…

As children increasingly use digital technologies in interactions with their parents (Marsh, 2003, 2004, 2011; Robinson & Turnbull, 2005), such possibilities create new ways in which literacy is practiced (Barton, Hamilton, & Ivanic, 2000; Jewitt, 2008; Street, 1998). Yet, what the literacy field knows about interactions between children…

Learning about letters, and how they differ from pictures, is one important aspect of a young child's print awareness. To test the hypothesis that parent speech provides children with information about these differences, we studied parent-child conversations in CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000). We found that parents talk to their young children about…

The Family Literacy Initiative (FLI) is a project that began as a few workshops offered to parents of elementary students who wanted to know what they could do in the summer to keep their kids writing. Since that time the FLI has grown tremendously: in the past five years, the authors have offered 130 workshops, reaching more than 2,750 adults and…