Activities to Promote Reading Development

Adult English language learners come from diverse backgrounds and have widely differing literacy experiences in their first languages. A number of factors influence the ways their English literacy develops and the progress they make in learning to read English. These factors include level of literacy in their first language and in English, oral language proficiency in English, educational background, personal goals for learning English, and the structure and writing system of their first language. These factors must be taken into account in all areas of program planning, learner placement in classes, and instructional approaches. This section looks at types of native language literacy and the reading process.

What Types of Native Language Literacy Might Learners Have?

Six types of first language literacy can be described: preliterate (learners come from cultures where the native language is not written or is in the process of being written); nonliterate (learners come from cultures where literacy is available, but they have not had sufficient access to literacy, often because of their socio-economic or political status); semiliterate (learners have had access to literacy in their native culture, but because of their socioeconomic status or political or educational situation, they have not achieved a high level of literacy in their native language); non-alphabet literate (learners are literate in a language with a non-alphabetic script [e.g., Chinese or Japanese]); non-Roman alphabet literate (learners are literate in a language with a non-Roman alphabetic script [e.g., Arabic, Greek, Korean, Russian, or Thai]); and Roman-alphabet literate (learners have literacy in a language such as French, Italian, or Croatian, which use the same alphabet as English). Teachers need to know the type and amount of literacy learners have in their native language, because this will affect the rate and the way in which they learn to read in English.

What Do Learners Need to Know to Read English?

Researchers working with adult English language learners have focused primarily on the following component skills of reading development: phonological processing, vocabulary knowledge, syntactic processing, and background knowledge. (See English Language and Literacy Learning: Research to Practice for discussion.)

Phonological processing (or decoding) involves interpreting written letters as sounds and combining letters correctly into words. This skill includes awareness of individual speech sounds and the ways they are represented in print, and the way that language is represented in print by letters, words, syllables, and word breaks. For example, in the sentence "My sister bought a new dress," the sound /b/ in the word bought is represented by the letter "b" and the sound /a/ is represented by the letters "ough;" sister divides into two syllables— sis/ter; and the sentence is composed of six discrete words.