Literacy, Adult

Assessments of Adult Literacy

The National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) is a nationally representative survey that measures English language literacy skills of U.S. adults age 16 years or older living in households or prisons. The NAAL defines literacy as both task based (everyday literacy tasks) and skills based (skills ranging from recognizing words to higher-level skills, such as making inferences from a text). Administered in 1992 and again in 2003, the NAAL examined adults' reading ability in three areas—prose literacy (e.g., newspapers, poems, and fiction); document literacy (e.g., job applications, bus schedules, and maps); and quantitative literacy (e.g., balancing a checkbook). Resulting classifications in prose literacy were either below basic (can do no more than the most simple and concrete literacy activities), basic (can perform simple and everyday literacy activities), intermediate (can perform moderately challenging literacy activities), and proficient (can perform challenging literacy activities). Results from 2003 show that about 43 percent of adults scored below basic or basic, and 57 percent of adults scored at the intermediate or proficient levels. No significant change in prose and document literacy occurred between the two assessments, but quantitative literacy increased.

Adult Literacy Education

Adult Basic Education (ABE) is typically either formal literacy instruction programs, such as that offered at community colleges, or volunteer tutors providing individualized instruction. Literacy tutors receive training through federally funded programs, such as the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps, or from literacy advocacy groups such as ProLiteracy Worldwide, the oldest and largest nongovernmental literacy organization in the world. ABE programs focus on teaching adults to read and write, but they might also offer basic mathematics instruction. ABE programs attract a wide range of participants in terms of ages, grade-level reading abilities, skills, and life experiences. Contrary to popular belief, most ABE participants are not illiterate but rather individuals who have completed several years of schooling yet remain unsuccessful at learning to read. Enrollment in ABE is typically free and open-ended, enabling adults to drop in and out as circumstances allow.

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