These are my sentiments, exactly, with adding the problem of
mathematics, the area most ABE to GED students have difficulty with.  Do
you have any suggestions for that? 

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Re: technology is the answer

Glenn's proposal for the use of print-to-speech decoding technology to
reform adult literacy education has some merit for adults with very
poorly developed decoding skills. But there is also the question of
vocabulary and comprehension. As the following research note indicates,
many adults with poorly developed reading abilities also lack well
developed listening abilities. For these adults, technology would also
have to improve word knowledge and comprehension of materials being
decoded for listening. I have looked for but not found much research on
the listening skills of adults in adult basic education programs. If
anyone has references to this kind of research I would appreciate
learning about them.
Tom Sticht


Research Note                 2 February 2002
Tom Sticht

The "Scientific" Understanding of Reading and the "Reading Potential" of
Adults  Assessed by Measuring Listening and Reading Abilities

The "scientific" work on reading that the National Reading Panel
reported takes its primary focus from the idea that, developmentally,
children typically acquire considerable competence in listening and
comprehending speech before they develop competence in reading and
comprehending the written language. Indeed, the whole idea behind the
teaching of "phonemic awareness,"  "phonics" and other "word attack"
techniques is that the learner's main task is to learn how to "decode"
the written language to reconstruct the spoken language which can then
be comprehended as usual.
This is the idea of reading as a second signaling system for listening
to and comprehending the oral language (for more on aspects of reading
that are not second signaling systems for listening see the paper
Teaching Reading With Adults under Full Text documents at www.nald.ca
searched by my last name).

The idea that listening competence develops first and that then reading
competence permits the learner to understand in writing that which could
earlier be understood only in the spoken language leads to the concept
of "reading potential." For children, the general notion is that they
enter school at the first grade with two types of receptive
communication
abilities: listening and reading (there are, of course, other
communication abilities, but they are not the object of discussion
here). Typically, children can comprehend better by listening than by
reading in the primary grades. Hypothetically for instance, a child in
the first grade may comprehend stories by listening as well as the
average third grader can comprehend the same stories by reading. Thus,
the average first graders listening score can be said to indicate a
"reading potential" of the third grade level, 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 graders reading ability.

The concept of "reading potential" is important for adult literacy
educators for at least two reasons. First, whether people are designated
as "learning disabled" or not is frequently  based on the idea that on
some measure, such as an "intelligence" test, the people are at their
appropriate age level or above, but on a reading measure they are one,
two or more years behind. In other words, they are not reading "up to
their potential."
Listening tests are one way of assessing people's "reading potential."
In fact, most individually administered intelligence or verbal IQ tests
present questions by speaking to the person being examined. The person
has to listen to receive the questions and explanations needed to
complete the test. Therefore, individual intelligence tests like the
Stanford-Binet, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, and Wechsler
intelligence scales for children and adults can be thought of largely as
listening tests.

The second reason that the concept of "reading potential" is important
in adult literacy education is that it is frequently thought that adults
in need of literacy education have lived a reasonably long time and
developed fairly high levels of competence in oral language, including
vocabulary and comprehension ability for listening. Therefore, it is
assumed, unlike children, whose oral language skills are not well
developed yet and who must acquire higher levels of vocabulary while
also learning to read, adults will be able to acquire a fairly high
level of literacy in a brief time, relative to that required by
children.  This leads to the expectation that the adult's literacy
problems may be solved fairly quickly with a relatively brief period of
training in some form of decoding the written word to utilize the vast
amount of competence already possessed in the oral language.

However, when some 2,000 adults were assessed to compare their skills in
both listening and reading, the anticipated higher level of listening
ability, particularly at the lower levels of reading (down to the 2nd
grade) as indicated by the Gates-MacGinitie reading test, did not emerge
when listening to comprehend paragraphs.

The data mentioned above  were obtained using group administered tests
in which the listening and reading measures were equated as closely as
possible in content, time to listen or read, and difficulty of the
questions, which were all multiple-choice requiring recall of factual
information.

The chapter by Sticht and James (1984) provides an extensive review of
listening and reading studies with adults. In one study, using the same
group test as used to obtain the data  given above,  an incarcerated
prison population of men reading at the 4th grade level showed about 1.5
grade levels of "potential."

Using a different group administered test of listening and reading
skills, the Durrell Listening and Reading Series tests, Sticht (1978)
reported that for 71 native speakers of English who were in an adult
literacy program their average reading level was at the 4.8 grade level,
while their reading "potential" was 6.0. Interestingly, for 45 adults
with English as a second language, their reading score was 4.8 while
their reading "potential" score was at the 4.4 grade 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!

Using the Diagnostic Reading Scales, which are administered one-on-one
as an individual test, Sticht & Beck (1976) assessed the reading
"potential" of 42 native English speakers and 32 English as a second
language speakers in an adult literacy




program. The native speakers had an average reading level at the 6.2
grade level and a "potential" at the grade 6.4 level. The non-native
English speakers read at an average 4.3 grade level and had a
"potential" at the
4.4 grade level.

Generally speaking, the studies cited suggest that adults with lower
levels of literacy tend to also have lower levels of oral language
(listening) comprehension (though note the use of the word "tend"
because this is not true of all adults). This tends to be true for both
vocabulary knowledge and the comprehension of connected discourse. Of
course, there can be important exceptions to these general trend data.
But as a rule, these data on listening and reading suggest that adult
literacy educators will have to provide the least able adult readers
(less than 4th grade abilities) 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 to improve both their oral and written language
comprehension abilities.

Reference
Sources for all  of the studies cited above, and many others exploring
listening and reading skills of  adults, may be found in Thomas G.
Sticht & J.  H. James (1984). Listening and Reading. In R. Barr, M.
Kamil, and P.
Mosenthal ( Eds.) Handbook of Reading Research. New York: Longmans.



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