Research With Adult Emergent Readers

Many adolescents and adults who are new to reading bring with them rich oral traditions from their past. Scholars have long known this and have also recognized that the transition to writing is a process often fraught with struggle and sacrifice, as well as empowerment and emancipation (Cook-Gumperz & Gumperz, Reference Cook-Gumperz, Gumperz and Whitehead1981; Freire, Reference Freire1970; Goody, Reference Goody1987; McLuhan, 1964/Reference McLuhan1994; Olson, Reference Olson2006; Ong, Reference Ong1982; Rubin, Reference Rubin, Spiro, Brice and Brewer1980; Tannen, Reference Tannen1982). A recent dissertation by Watson (Reference Watson2010) explores in extraordinary depth the phenomenon of moving from orality to literacy. Drawing from a range of disciplines, Watson described the distance between the lifeworlds of indigenous cultures and those of cultures of high literacy as a semiotic abyss. This highly charged and politically oriented research reveals much in terms of what educators must understand about how to teach adolescents and young adults who come to class as emergent readers. Watson argued for “a pedagogy of reciprocity between orality and literacy” (p. v) in which primarily oral and primarily literate societies share the strengths of each other's ways of being in the world. This reciprocity, Watson reasoned, may be a path to the survival of both societies.

The research literature offers studies in which oral traditions grounded in historical, cultural roots are incorporated into teaching activities. For example, in qualitative research carried out with Sudanese families, Perry explored how personal stories and folktales can be used to teach literacy skills in English (Perry, Reference Perry and Purcell-Gates2007, Reference Perry2008). Creating classroom activities that truly embrace the oral literacies of refugee adolescents and adults can be constructive avenues into print literacies in the L2. Similarly, in ethnographic work with Somali adolescent girls, Bigelow (Reference Bigelow2010) found that one participant was powerfully motivated to convey her favorite Somali folktales to English speakers so that they could learn from them and be entertained by them. She also understood that her folktales, originally told in oral modes in Somali, needed to be carefully written and edited in English for her readers to want to read them. Her motivation to share her stories resulted in many revisions that attended to both meaning and form. This research linking L1 oral traditions to L2 literacy offers new pedagogies within Western schooling practices that break down barriers to literacies needed in the new, literate society. That is, by building on community cultural wealth through use of oral traditions, new epistemologies and pedagogies can emerge (Yosso & García, Reference Yosso and García2007), which can include learners’ histories of migration and traditional ways of relaying information, teaching, and entertaining.

Other studies uncover ways in which cultural strengths within immigrant and refugee families can also support educational aims. For example, in a mother-daughter qualitative case study, Espinoza-Herold (Reference Espinoza-Herold2007) described how the cultural dichos (sayings) used by a Mexican immigrant mother with little formal schooling supported her adolescent daughter in achieving her educational goals. Similarly, Bigelow (Reference Bigelow and Faux2007) found that a Somali mother with limited formal schooling, low levels of English language proficiency, and low native language literacy was able to do many things to help her children succeed in U.S. public schools. She would facilitate her children getting help with projects by releasing them from household chores to attend bilingual homework help programs or simply to work quietly at the public library. She would also take friends to help her interpret conversations with teachers about how her children were doing in school, who their friends were, and if they were doing their homework. In another study with Sudanese families, Walker-Dalhouse and Dalhouse (Reference Walker-Dalhouse and Dalhouse2009) learned, through conversations with parents, that there were many ways teachers could link to the students’ home languages and cultures. Such studies illuminate how learners’ social and cultural characteristics can inform and enrich instruction in powerful ways. Instead of reducing literacy to a set of skills to be mastered, teachers can take into account the complex processes at work in the classroom and within and among their learners.

Instruction for emergent adult/adolescent readers must fulfill two needs: Adults need contextualized, meaningful instruction that is age and level appropriate, and this instruction needs to be explicit and systematic, focusing on phonemic awareness, phonics, and word recognition. Whole-part-whole instruction is a balanced approach to teaching literacy (see Trupke-Bastidas & Poulos, Reference Trupke-Bastidas and Poulos2007; Vinogradov, Reference Vinogradov2008). While focusing first on a meaningful story and establishing meaning, instructors using whole-part-whole instruction then move to specific parts (sounds, sight words, word families, etc.), before returning to the entire story for further study. This way the components or parts of language are never taught without being located within a memorable, interesting, meaningful context. Examples of such instruction for teacher-training purposes can be found in a brief video from New American Horizons (www.newamericanhorizons.org) and also in a publication from the Center for Applied Linguistics (Vinogradov & Bigelow, Reference Vinogradov and Bigelow2010).

This section explores some of the well-documented principles related to teaching adults without prior schooling who are emergent readers. We focus on principles because not all of the practices have a robust research base. DeCapua and Marshall (Reference DeCapua and Marshall2011) have developed an approach to teaching learners with limited formal education they call the mutually adaptive learning paradigm (MALP). This paradigm asks educators to (a) understand and accept the unique cognitive and social orientations of learners without prior schooling; (b) creatively combine processes characteristic of these learners and those of U.S. schools; and (c) focus on U.S. learning activities with familiar language and content. This section explores examples from research that follow this approach.

One of the principles of teaching adults new to literacy that has persisted over time is the importance of using content from students’ lives to develop basic literacy through balanced literacy instruction (Auerbach, Reference Auerbach1992; Condelli et al., Reference Condelli, Wrigley, Yoon, Reder and Bynner2008; Crandall & Peyton, Reference Crandall and Peyton1993; Weinstein, Reference Weinstein, Beckett and Chamness Miller2006). The use of learner-generated texts, a slightly more specific method that is widely known as the language experience approach (LEA), allows students and teachers together to tap into learners’ often more developed listening and speaking skills to build literacy (Geva & Zadeh, Reference Geva and Zadeh2006). Oral processing skills and print literacy skills are interconnected and interdependent (Tarone, Bigelow, & Hansen, Reference Tarone, Bigelow and Hansen2009), and as learners practice and build their oral abilities, learner-generated texts provide a means to connect these skills and to present oral language on paper. The result is an array of rich and interesting readings for students.

In LEA, for example, students first share a common experience, perhaps a field trip or an experience like making a cup of tea in the classroom. Then, the teacher guides them to retell the experience aloud. Students recall what happened to a teacher or another scribe who writes down their words. Later, these words are used as reading texts. From here, a number of bottom-up techniques can be used to focus on word analysis and particular sounds and structures. Then, students revisit the entire text they have created and perhaps add to it. LEA is an efficient technique in working with emergent readers as it connects what they are able to communicate orally to what they are learning to do in print (Crandall & Peyton, Reference Crandall and Peyton1993; Vinogradov, Reference Vinogradov, Wall and Leong2010).

Research with Children

The process of becoming literate for adults, it has been argued, is different from that of children. For example, adults have different strategies to draw upon to learn, and they have more life experience to bring to their comprehension of text (Weinstein, Reference Weinstein, Beckett and Chamness Miller2006). Adults may take longer and have different emotional reactions to learning to read, depending on how much they have been stigmatized for not knowing how to read during their lives (Bartlett, Reference Bartlett2007). Adults may also approach learning literacy and language with a sense of urgency, as their family's well-being depends on their ability to find and maintain employment and provide life's basic necessities. Unlike children, adults have many responsibilities outside of school, and attending literacy and language classes is often a luxury of time and resources. However, although adults and children learn differently, adult emergent readers must also acquire the same skills and fulfill the same cognitive stages as children learning to read. Although this process looks different for adults and instruction must also differ, we do not recommend ignoring all research or instructional materials created for emergent L2 readers who are children. For example, Gardner (Reference Gardner2008) designed her playful phonological awareness curriculum for young emergent readers with the following principles in mind:

1. 1. Teachers should check comprehension because learners may decode, or pronounce text, but not comprehend it. Decoding which results in comprehension is essential.

2. 2. Students should complete tasks and teachers should maintain high expectations of students’ work, particularly their discussion about text.

3. 3. Students should become accustomed to justifying answers to questions about text.

4. 4. Teachers should expect that discussions about texts are designed to be meaningful.

5. 5. Teachers should use formative assessment to monitor progress. (pp. 265–266)

A detailed examination of a short lesson using a prescriptive curriculum showed that these principles resulted in instruction that had a range of features including language play, whole-class shared imaging of the text, valuing the children's thoughts, opening up the communication to a two-way process where there is space for learning, connecting learning to students’ lives, and legitimizing home languages and cultures. Even in the unlikely context of a prescriptive phonics lesson, this transformative, meaningful, and contextualized language instruction was possible. These outcomes are certainly what we hope can occur for adults who are also learning skills such as sound-letter correspondence.

Other research with children is relevant to consider when devising instruction for adult L2 learners without print literacy. For example, ways that oral language development assists in literacy development is another area that has been explored with children acquiring an L2 (e.g., August & Shanahan, Reference August and Shanahan2006; de la Piedra, Reference de la Piedra2006; Geva & Zadeh, Reference Geva and Zadeh2006; Gonzalez & Uhing, Reference Gonzalez and Uhing2008). Teachers should work to develop L2 oral skills while developing literacy skills; language skills are interdependent, and oral skills pave the way for literacy. Likewise, reading skills transfer between L1 and L2(s) among children (Bialystok, Reference Bialystok2007; Bialystok, Luk, & Kwan, Reference Bialystok, Luk and Kwan2005). The skills related to grapheme-phoneme correspondence can be applied to any alphabetic language. We believe that this phenomenon of transfer occurs among adolescent and adult language learners as well, although this assumption must be empirically verified. Work exploring the parallels and differences between emergent writing in L1 children and emergent writing in L2 adults without print literacy was recently done by Kurvers et al., (Reference Kurvers, van Hout, Vallen and Faux2007). Their study implies that while preliterate adults and children appear to follow similar stages as they learn to write, adults bring a different kind of print awareness to the classroom. Although the adults in the study were able to recognize many words on sight (they had lived in a print-rich environment for many years), they still needed direct instruction to connect oral language to writing and to access the “inside of the written code” (Kurvers et al., Reference Kurvers and Faux2007, p. 885). However, the adult emergent readers had knowledge of print, and they brought to instruction knowledge of the functions and uses of print that the children did not. Adult literacy teachers need to keep in mind that learners are not naïve about writing and literacy instruction does not need to begin “from scratch” (Kurvers et al., Reference Kurvers, van Hout, Vallen and Faux2007, p. 885). Such studies comparing the literacy acquisition of L2 adult emergent readers and L1 children are rare, although there is much to learn. Research with monolingual students is much more common, and we examine such learners next.

Research with Monolinguals

In the same way we can turn to research with bi- or multilingual children in an effort to understand the processes adult L2 learners go through to become literate, we can also turn to research done with monolingual adults in their L1. This work makes few and broad explicit links to teaching, but we believe that it is beneficial for educators to be aware of it to understand three main points: (a) The human brain in normal adults changes with the advent of specifically alphabetic (not logographic) print literacy; (b) these changes have been explored with research methodologies that measure a narrow range of language processing skills; and (c) the knowledge produced within these lines of research suggests that educators of adolescent and adult L2 learners should challenge the popular and well-documented assumption in research with children that phonemic awareness (e.g., the ability to distinguish sounds, syllables, and rhymes) must come before the ability to read. In recent years, the field has moved to accept that the relationship of phonemic awareness and achievement in reading appears to be reciprocal (Yopp, Reference Yopp1992). The literature relevant to adult emergent readers regarding brain changes and alphabetic literacy development, language processing, and phonemic awareness is summarized briefly here, because it has already appeared elsewhere in greater detail (Bigelow & Watson, Reference Bigelow, Watson, Gass and Mackey2011; Tarone & Bigelow, Reference Tarone and Bigelow2005; Tarone et al., Reference Tarone, Bigelow and Hansen2009).

Cognitive scientists have provided a fascinating and relevant body of research that explores how lack of alphabetic print literacy affects how adults perceive, repeat, and manipulate oral language. This research has been done with monolingual adults in their L1s (Adrian, Alegria, & Morais, Reference Adrian, Alegria and Morais1995; Bramão et al., Reference Bramão, Mendonça, Faísca, Ingvar, Petersson and Reis2007; Dellatolas et al., Reference Dellatolas, Braga, Souza, Filho, Queiroz and Deloche2003; Reis & Castro-Caldas, Reference Reis and Castro-Caldas1997; Reis et al., Reference Reis, Faísca, Mendonça, Ingvar and Petersson2007; Reis, Guerreiro, & Petersson, Reference Reis, Guerreiro and Petersson2003). It suggests that even a small amount of literacy can make a difference in the performance of certain oral tasks. In these studies adults with some print literacy could manipulate language units such as phonemes and syllables, while adults without print literacy performed significantly worse on these oral skills. Dropping the first sound from a word (e.g., take /ka/ off /kade/) and flipping syllables in a word (e.g., /keda/ becomes /dake/) was much harder for illiterate adults than it was for those with alphabetic print literacy. On the other hand, participants performed similarly on oral tasks involving rhyming or generating lists of semantically related words. It seems that basic alphabetic literacy offers adults a strategy for visualizing encoded oral language in order to manipulate it phonemically.

Research carried out with Chinese-speaking participants corroborates independently the findings of the previous research. Charles Read and his colleagues (Read, Zhang, Nie, & Ding, Reference Read, Zhang, Nie and Ding1986) found that individuals who were literate only in the logographic Chinese script, not the Romanized script, performed similarly to adults without alphabetic print literacy. This suggests that there is something unique about becoming literate in an alphabetic script, as opposed to a logographic, or character-based, script. Interesting, too, are the results obtained from de Gelder, Vroomen, and Bertelson (Reference de Gelder, Vroomen and Bertelson1993), who studied bilingual Chinese adults residing in the Netherlands who were all able to read Chinese logograms. The group was divided into two groups: those who could read an alphabetic language (Dutch) and those who could not. There were significant differences between the groups in terms of the ability to delete word-initial consonants (e.g., /stan/ becomes /tan/) but no difference in rhyming tasks, similar to the studies described earlier. Researchers also tried to teach participants without alphabetic print literacy how to segment speech, but participants were not able to do so after the instruction. Again, alphabetic print literacy seems to promote awareness that utterances can be segmented and promote the skills to do this sort of task.

The cognitive neuroscience research done in Olhão, a fishing village in southern Portugal, warrants some elaboration here. (See Petersson, Ingvar, & Reis, Reference Petersson, Ingvar, Reis, Olson and Torrance2009, for a recent summary.) This robust and active research program spans more than a decade in its attempts to isolate the cognitive processes that are consequences of literacy among adults, albeit in their L1, not an L2. Findings support the idea that formal schooling and alphabetic literacy acquisition is not only a process for cultural transmission but also a mechanism that changes the physical makeup of the human brain and the way the brain processes oral language.

The context of this research in Portugal is a socioculturally homogeneous community with low mobility. Causes of illiteracy in this context were due to sociocultural circumstances, not individual causes such as a learning disability or brain injury. In this village it was common to find families in which the older daughters did not attend school and the younger children did, although only for approximately 4 years. Researchers observed that illiteracy was not understood as problematic socially, and literate and illiterate individuals led similar lives working in agriculture or fishing. Therefore, it was possible to match participants who were literate with those who were not.

In one study, literate and illiterate participants from Olhão were asked to repeat words and pseudowords, because this task is a good measure of phonological processing. PET (positron-emission tomography) scans showed that literate participants had much more brain activation, occurring in more regions of the brain, during pseudoword repetition than did illiterate participants. Researchers explain this phenomenon as being in part due to the notion that verbal working memory is supported by the ability to store visuospatial information. In other words, the way that oral language is processed and stored is influenced by alphabetic literacy and aspects of subsyllabic phonological structures within literate participants. In another study by Reis et al. (Reference Reis, Faísca, Mendonça, Ingvar and Petersson2007) and a following study by Kolinsky, Cary, and Morais (Reference Kolinsky, Cary and Morais1987), literate and illiterate participants were asked to listen to words and pseudowords during a task in which they had to decide which word of a pair was the longest (e.g., /stan/ or /tan/). The literate participants showed no difference between their ability to determine phonological length of words and pseudowords. The illiterate participants, on the other hand, performed better when identifying the length of pseudowords than words. The researchers explain these apparently contradictory results by arguing that illiterate participants struggled more to inhibit the influence of semantic interference in their decision of which word or pseudoword was longer. In other words, when illiterate participants were able to concentrate only on length (not the meanings of words they knew), they were better able to discern word length.

This team of researchers has carried out numerous other studies exploring the role of alphabetic literacy in phonological processing. For example, they explored the role of literacy in processing lexical items within a sentence context and found that explicit knowledge of words as independent units is dependent on literacy. Emergent readers may not be able to identify closed-class words or words without semantic content (determiners, prepositions, pronouns) as easily as adults with literacy. In another study, they explored the role of literacy in identifying black and white photographs versus colored drawings, with the literate group outperforming the illiterate group. Color, the researchers argue, is related to the semantic value of the images. Color and realistic images enhance the interpretation for adults without formal schooling. Researchers are quick to admit that it is problematic to use tasks that resemble those commonly performed in classroom settings, because the literate group would be advantaged. This problem was described in Luria's (Reference Luria, Cole, Lopez-Morillas and Solataroff, Trans1976) foundational research with illiterate adults in Russia.

The idea that even a very low level of alphabetic print literacy may facilitate performance on some phonemic awareness tasks has implications for teaching and learning. For example, teachers must know that it is entirely normal for adult emergent readers to have much more difficulty manipulating phonemes in oral language than adults with even minimal alphabetic print literacy. Likewise, some phonemic awareness skills may come after learners have begun to acquire basic literacy concepts, rather than before, an order that is assumed by many scholars of child L1 literacy. If being able to perceive phonemes in the speech stream depends on literacy, perhaps those with low literacy will not be able to use corrective feedback related to the manipulation of phonemes as efficiently as those with more print literacy. Teachers may also take from this research that it is very important to reduce the level of abstraction of materials—visually and linguistically. Images should be discussed to establish meaning within them (e.g., discuss how the pictures of the peach and the apple differ with students). Pictures should align with real life as much as possible (e.g., pictures of foods should closely resemble what they supposedly represent and ideally appear in color). Finally, authentic instruction that relates to learners’ lives and does not depend on knowing how to do activities learned in school (e.g., multiple choice questions accompanying a reading) will help those who have not had formal schooling stay engaged. It will also make them feel capable as they embark on L2 initial literacy.