| Few informal literacy assessments are available for adult beginning readers and writers, especially for those adults reading below a second-grade level. The purpose of this interpretive study was to develop and utilize an informal assessment designed to uncover what literacy knowledge adults possess, and how that knowledge could be used to inform one-to-one literacy instruction.;The study was conducted in two phases. During Phase I, seven adult beginning readers and writers from Adult Basic Education and prerelease prison programs, who crossed ethnic, gender and age boundaries, participated in a Literacy Survey and a Literacy Interview. The Literacy Survey included six interactive literacy tasks, based on Marie Clay's Diagnostic Survey. The Literacy Interview questions focused on students' literacy history, goals, beliefs and attitudes, and responses to participating in the Literacy Survey.;During Phase II, two of the seven participants were tutored by the investigator for forty-six hours each with techniques and procedures adapted from Clay's Reading Recovery program.;The results of the Literacy Interview indicated that students were focused on accuracy in both reading and writing, possessed more complex knowledge of an interest in reading than writing, and exhibited resistence to writing. Primary categories from the analyses of the students' Literacy Interview included: perceived benefits of literacy, perceived barriers to literacy, and perceived bridges to literacy.;No ceiling effects occurred on the Literacy Survey tasks. The tasks revealed the students on the whole did not understand punctuation, read aloud with little fluency and phrasing, and relied more upon graphophonemic information than syntactic or semantic information to solve problems at instructional or difficult reading levels. Frequently what the students said about reading and writing did not match what they did while engaged in reading and writing.;The results of Phase II of the study showed that some of the techniques used in Reading Recovery helped adult beginning literates make progress toward becoming more fluent readers and writers.;Progress in literacy learning for adult beginning readers and writers can be maximized when assessments are designed to reveal: (1) how students function on realistic reading and writing tasks, (2) what students believe about literacy, and (3) each student's literacy background. |
