From oracy to literacy
Dr Thomas G Sticht

As children grow up, their listening ability develops first and reading ability is acquired later. This leads to the concept of 'reading potential'. When they enter the primary grades, children can generally comprehend more by listening than by reading. For instance, a child in the first grade may comprehend stories by listening just as well as the average third grader can comprehend the same stories by reading. Therefore, the average first grader's listening score can be said to indicate a 'reading potential' of the third grade level. This is because if the average first grade child could instantly comprehend by reading as well as he or she can by listening, they would have a reading ability comparable to a typical third grader's reading ability.

The concept of 'reading potential' is important for adult literacy educators for at least two reasons. Firstly, people are frequently designated as learning disabled based on a measure, such as an 'intelligence' test. Often, these people are at their appropriate age level or above, but on a reading measure they are one, two or more years behind. That is, they are not reading 'up to their potential'. Listening tests are one way of assessing people's 'intelligence' or 'verbal IQ'.

The second reason that reading potential is important is, because of their age, adults in need of literacy education are expected to have developed fairly high levels of competence in oral language. This would provide the adult literacy learner with a fairly high level of reading potential. In turn, this leads to the expectation that the adult's literacy problems may be solved fairly quickly with a brief period of training in decoding the written word, so that the language comprehension competence already possessed in oracy may be transferred for use by the newly developed literacy.

Contrary to this expectation, in research in the United States, when some 2,000 adults were assessed to compare their skills in both listening and reading, the anticipated higher level of listening over reading ability was not found, even with adults reading at the second grade level. In another study, a prison population of men reading at the fourth grade level showed only about 1.5 grade levels of potential (Sticht & James, 1984 ).

Using a different test of listening and reading skills, 71 native speakers of English in an adult literacy programme had an average reading level at the 4.8 grade level, while their reading potential was 6.0. Interestingly, 45 adults with English as a second language had average reading scores at the grade 4.8 level while their reading potential score was at the grade 4.4 level. In other words, their listening skills were lower than their reading skills, so when the listening score was converted to a reading potential score, they performed below their actual reading level (Sticht, 1978)!

Further research (Sticht & Beck, 1976), assessed the reading potential of 42 native English speakers and 32 speakers who had English as a second language, in an adult literacy programme. The native speakers had an average reading level at grade 6.2 level and a potential at grade 6.4 level. The non-native English speakers read at an average grade 4.3 level and had a potential at grade 4.4 level.

Generally speaking, these data on listening and reading suggest that adult literacy educators may have to provide many of the least able adult readers (less than fourth grade ability) with not only effective instruction in phonemics, phonics and other decoding knowledge, but also extensive opportunities for these adults to develop lots of new vocabulary and content knowledge using their oracy skills. This way, they can raise the adults' reading potential by listening and speaking and the instruction in decoding can help them comprehend what they are able to read at their new level of potential.

References

T. Sticht and J. James (1984) Listening and reading. In R. Barr, M. Kamil and P. Mosenthal (eds.) Handbook of Reading Research, New York: Longman.
See also: T. Sticht (2002) Teaching Reading With Adults. Online at www.nald.ca under Full Text Documents.

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