The Functional Literacy Project of India was initiated in 1967 as part of a joint program, involving several Indian government ministries and United Nations agencies, to train some five million farm families in both literacy and modern agricultural skills at the same time. This report first describes the beginnings of the project and its…

Functionally illiterate adults differ in several ways from children in a learning setting: they have a broader range of experience, they are more rigid and resistant to change, they know what they want from education, they are free to drop out at any time, they may have a long history of failure, they want to see immediate and visible progress,…

The position that the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) provides a data base that is compatible with various definitions of literacy and standards of competencies and can make a contribution to our understanding of the complex and controversial problem of literacy is supported in this paper. The paper notes that since the NAEP has…

Twenty-four adults participated in an experiment to determine the difficulty of conditional sentences of the kinds frequently found in the instructions in government forms. The stimulus materials were 128 sentence frames of the form, "If you are X, press button Y," where X was replaced by sixteen different coordinate structures. These…

Sixteen volunteer aides living in inner city Milwaukee were selected according to education (a high school diploma), age (21 years or older), experience working with people, dependability, and availability. They were divided into four groups, and each group was assigned an instructor from the Marquette University reading staff. Ten weekly training…

The question of whether or not the level of reading competency has declined over the years, is addressed in this report. The study attempts to determine whether there is sufficient data to answer the question and to decide if the available factual information allows an answer to the question posed. Chapter one, describing the first phase of the…

This program, included in "Effective Reading Programs...," serves all students, kindergarten through grade twelve, in Maryland's public schools. The prime objective of the program is to ensure that all Maryland students can meet society's reading demands. The following three major considerations determine the goals: the reader as a…

This document is concerned with the efforts of the United Nations toward putting into concrete form the problem of adult education and its multiple aspects in an attempt to launch an attack against illiteracy. The point is put forth that one of the scandals of the 20th century is the percentage of people in the world who do not know how to read or…

The major goal of the Right-to-Read program is to increase functional literacy so that, by 1980, 99% of the people in the United States who are under 16 years of age and 90% of those over 16 will be sufficiently competent as readers to function effectively as adults. This booklet suggests ways in which groups and organizations can initiate and…

This study investigated various reading and writing abilities among 25- and 35-year-old residents of Linkoping, Sweden, and assessed the extent to which these individuals' abilities could be regarded as satisfactory for their needs. In all, 377 subjects were tested on the following skills: alphabet recognition, copying ability, reading rate,…

After reviewing the literature on functional literacy, proposes that new measures be developed and classified according to the practical information to be obtained and the decisions to be made from them. (AA)

Discusses the decisions made in the development of a functional literacy test used in Philadelphia. (MKM)

Traces the origins of the literacy tradition in indigenous African cultures to the use of the tools of literacy by two black social activists--W.E.B. Dubois and Malcolm X. Also stresses the relationship of literacy to social action, self-education, and liberation of the mind. (AEW)

Describes a program designed to develop interactive, language-experience-based software to promote functional literacy among illiterate adults. The project uses the microcomputer with language-experience-based software to aid the teacher in providing highly individualized instruction to illiterate learners. (CT)

Relates Victorian attitudes toward education by a forgotten 19th century liberal educator concerned with proper moral education. Concludes that uses and development of basic literacy are severely bound by individual and social contexts and that basic literacy does not, in itself, wield a magical transforming power for learning and life. (TRS)