Recent calls for additional emphases upon synthetic phonics in
the United Kingdom caused me to ask, "Suppose that you could
wave your hands in front of the eyes of children entering the
primary schools and make it possible for them to instantly know
phonics and to be able to decode any text. Would all children
then be equally literate?" Research on adult literacy development
suggests not.
Three years ago the US Partnership for Reading published a report
authored by John Kruidenier entitled Research-Based Principles
for Adult Basic Education Reading Instruction. The report laments
the paucity of research on adult reading and discusses how it
draws upon K-12 [Kindergarten to Grade 12] research to inform
adult reading instruction when that is appropriate. Missing in
most of the recent guidance on scientific, evidence-based research
for teaching children to read is any reference to adult literacy
research that can inform K-12 educational practice.
However, the Spring 2003 issue of the American Educator, the
professional journal of the American Federation of Teachers, an
AFL-CIO labour organisation for educators, published a special
issue with the title: "The Fourth-Grade Plunge: The Cause,
the Cure". The cover of the special includes a summary that
states:
"In fourth grade, poor children's reading comprehension
starts a drastic decline-and rarely recovers. The Cause: They
hear millions fewer words at home than do their advantaged peers
- and since words represent knowledge, they don't gain the knowledge
that underpins reading comprehension. The Cure: Immerse these
children, and the many others whose comprehension is low, in words
and the knowledge the words represent- as early as possible."
Inside the journal, the major article is by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.,
author of the bestselling, and controversial book Cultural Knowledge:
What Every American Needs to Know (Houghton Mifflin, 1987). In
the present article, Hirsch offers one approach to building children's
comprehension ability in a section called, Build Oral Comprehension
and Background Knowledge. The section begins with the statement,
"Thomas Sticht has shown that oral comprehension typically
places an upper limit on reading comprehension; if you don't recognise
and understand the word when you hear it, you also won't be able
to comprehend it when reading. This tells us something very important:
oral comprehension generally needs to be developed in our youngest
readers if we want them to be good readers."
Hirsch cites a book entitled Auding and Reading: A Developmental
Model by Sticht, et al (HumRRO, 1974 - now out of print) in support
of his statement. In an earlier book entitled The Schools We Need
and Why We Don't Have Them (Doubleday, 1996) Hirsch has referred
to the limits of oral language comprehension on reading comprehension
once decoding has been acquired as "Sticht`s Law."
Later in this special issue of the American Educator, Andrew
Biemiller, a professor at the Institute of Child Study at the
University of Toronto extends Hirsch's point in an article entitled,
Oral Comprehension Sets the Ceiling on Reading Comprehension.
In support of his argument Biemiller cites a chapter by Sticht
& James (1984) which includes an extended discussion of the
concepts of "oracy to literacy transfer" and the use
of listening assessment to determine "reading potential."
What I have found particularly interesting is that these articles
cite research by colleagues and myself that was done as part of
a programme of research to better understand adult reading education,
not childhood reading. Almost 30 years ago, to aid in the better
understanding of adult literacy issues, colleagues and I wrote
Auding and Reading: A Developmental Model to provide a summary
and synthesis of how the "typical child," a theoretical
abstraction of course, born into our literate society grows up
to become literate in the judgment of other adults. This was done
to provide a frame of reference for better understanding how it
is that some children, unlike the "typical child," grow
up to be less than adequately literate in the judgment of other
adults and might benefit from participating in an adult literacy
programme.
The Auding and Reading book offered guidance for adult reading
instruction that presaged the present
guidance in the American Educator for K-12 education. For instance,
on page 122 of Auding and Reading we stated the need for: "Methods
for improving oral language skills as foundation skills for reading.
In this regard, it would seem that, at least with beginning or
unskilled readers, a sequence of instruction in which vocabulary
and concepts are first introduced and learned via oracy skills
would reduce the learning burden by not requiring the learning
of both vocabulary and decoding skills at the same time. It is
difficult to see how a person can learn to recognise printed words
by "sounding them out" through some decoding scheme
if, in fact, the words are not in the oral language of the learner.
Thus an oracy-to-literacy sequence of training would seem desirable
in teaching vocabulary and concepts to unskilled readers."
The Auding and Reading book goes on to discuss concepts of automaticity
in decoding, which underlies fluency of decoding in both auding
and reading and why it is important to develop fluency (automaticity)
of decoding for the constructive processes involved in comprehension
by languaging to proceed either by listening to the spoken language
or by reading the written language.
It is indicative of the rather long time that it takes for ideas
to be disseminated and assimilated in a field of knowledge that
this year the American Educator, which reaches a million or so
educators, has brought many of
the ideas from adult literacy research into the arena of K-12
education.
There remains a need for further understanding of the life span
changes that affect reading. For instance, the International Adult
Literacy Survey (IALS) indicated that as adults got older, their
performance of IALS literacy tasks dropped. In research on the
use of the telephone to assess literacy, colleagues and I found
that we could draw upon the theoretical foundation of literacy
given in the Auding and Reading book and subsequent research on
listening and reading to assess knowledge development across the
life span.
In this case, we found that older adults knew more than younger
adults about a wide range of subjects. We used techniques that
did not overload working memory like most of the IALS tasks do.
Because older adults generally lose some working memory capacity,
we felt that IALS type tasks are inappropriate for assessing the
literacy ability of older adults. Whatever the case, the fact
that adults change across the life span argues for more research
to better understand literacy development in adulthood beyond
what we have learned today and what we can gleam from studying
the literacy development of children. Interestingly, as the foregoing
illustrates, what new learning we acquire about adult literacy
development across the life span may have additional, important
implications for K-12 literacy education. This adds weight to
the importance of policies that emphasise the need for research
on adult literacy education.
Thomas G. Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education
(Basic Skills Agency website, October 2005)
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