The study aimed at exploring reading acquisition in Arabic from the perspective of a newly-literate adult native speaker, seeking to improve her reading ability and recite the Quran. Drawing mainly on a participatory cognitive schematic-interactive approach, and accounting for a literacy social view, the study's construct allowed the investigation…

Background: In Germany, three large-scale surveys--the Level One Study (LEO), the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), and the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS)--provide complementary data on adults' literacy skills that can be harnessed to study adults with low literacy. To ensure that research on…

This paper examines the degree to which British adults participating in workplace literacy courses improved their reading comprehension skills, using longitudinal data which cover the period from enrolment until between two and three years later. Learners were tested using an instrument designed explicitly for adults, with two parallel forms. For…

Health literacy, defined as an individual's capacity to process health information in order to make appropriate health decisions, is the focus of increasing attention in medical fields due to growing awareness that suboptimal health literacy is associated with poorer health outcomes. To explore this issue, a number of instruments, reported to have…

Successful adult literacy and basic education programs are notoriously difficult to achieve. One reason for this has to do with how the question, "literacy for what?" is answered for a given program. All too frequently, the answer to that question is shaped more by the goals of the literacy provider than it is by learners' own goals and…

A study to determine the incidence of functional illiteracy in English among adults in the metropolitan area of Sydney is reported, which showed the incidence of illiteracy among Australian/English born adults to be lower than previously reported while that among non-English born is very high. (WL)

Reviewing the situation of literacy in the mother tongue, the article reports on projects in: (1) Africa--Mali and Nigeria, (2) the Amazonian jungle of Peru in Latin America, and (3) Papua, New Guinea. Psychological, sociological, and educational advantages of the mother tongue are discussed. (MW)

This report summarizes the proceedings of a day-long conference for adult literacy practitioners in Toronto. The conference addressed the many ways in which education can become more inclusive of adult learners. During the seven different workshops, participants explored questions of "voice." Common concerns included the following: (1) many people…

The following papers from a conference on the dimensions of literacy in a multicultural society are included in this volume: "Literacy: Affirmation and Empowerment in a Multicultural Society" (Simms); "Literacy, Border Pedagogy, and Multiculturalism in the Aftermath of the Los Angeles Uprising" (Giroux); "Alphabetisme et…