Research on Reading Development of Adult English Learners: An Annotated Bibliography-- P through T

An adult child’s experience in sharing literacy materials with her mother and fostering her mother’s English reading ability.

The learner involved in this study was a Chinese immigrant in her late forties. She had lived in the United States for 30 years and was functionally literate in English. While she was able to read English newspapers, she did not consider herself a reader in English and did not engage in pleasure reading in English.

The “teacher” in this study was the learner’s adult daughter, a graduate student in educational psychology, a lifelong lover of reading who speaks limited Chinese. As a second generation Asian-American woman, she felt isolated from her Chinese heritage, and was drawn to books with Asian-American themes.

The practice of reading together began when the teacher gave her mother Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses to read. This novel is about a woman and her relationship with her Chinese half-sister. Over time, Packard kept a journal of their interactions surrounding this and the other books they read. Most of the conversations were held over the phone. This book, and the other books read, The Kitchen God’s Wife, Eat a Bowl of Tea, and Wild Swans prompted discussion on the characters in the books, on Chinese culture and history, and on the author’s mother’s family history.

After Packard read a novel or memoir about the Chinese-American experience she would suggest to her mother that she read the book. Then they would discuss the books through phone conversations. They brainstormed other possible endings to the books. Increasingly, Packard’s mother took the opportunity during these book discussions to “weave in” stories of her own life and that of Packard’s grandmother. Packard has now compiled a list of 11 books by Asian Americans, recommended by friends, that Packard and her mother plan to read and discuss.

By self-report, the mother’s reading improved as did her confidence in her reading. She no longer read in a choppy way but rather read in a smooth line-by-line fashion. She also said she read faster. Chinese characters are read one at a time but in English it is faster to read the whole sentence together. She felt that she could skip words in English that she did not know and “still get the meaning of the whole story.

Both the mother and the daughter felt that they were able to participate as learners and teachers in this exchange as the mother had knowledge of Chinese and family history and culture, and the daughter had knowledge of the English language.

The mother’s English literacy was not pre- or post-tested to see if her vocabulary and fluency had improved and could be transferred to other reading genres. The mother was not formally interviewed before and after the study to document how her attitudes and practices around reading in English had changed. All gains were untested and self-reported.

Implications for Practice

One could structure a family literacy program that featured shared reading (and writing) experiences between adolescent children and their immigrant parents using culturally relevant texts.

Key Words

Family literacy
Pleasure reading

Areas for Further Research

A family literacy program like this that taps into the cultural heritage of the participants could be studied using pre- and post-testing to determine how literacy-sharing in the family affects language learning.

back to table of contents

The learners were beginning-level ESL students at an intensive English center in the United States. The students were participants in a comprehensive reading course. The number of students is unspecified, as are their ethnolinguisitic backgrounds.

The researcher created materials that help introduce students to semantic and syntactic forms before they read. Termed “expectation exercises,” these activities involved first explaining the target vocabulary items, syntactic structures, or rhetorical structures. Following the instruction, students worked individually on multiple-choice sentence completion questions. The point of the sentence completion exercises was to encourage the students to begin to predict the linguistic content of the reading based on their knowledge of the language. They were meant to serve as a bridge between language study and reading study. The article explains the expectation materials and their use in the classroom. The findings are based on the teacher researchers’ impressions of the success of the activities.

The researcher indicated that the materials were generally successful in the classroom. Although no objective testing was included in the study, he concluded that these exercises successfully encouraged students to apply both their background knowledge and their linguistic knowledge to comprehend texts.

The idea behind this study is interesting and the researcher’s observations about the limitations of traditional textbook formats is certainly relevant. Many studies have indicated that previewing content can help improve learner reading comprehension; it is very likely that previewing linguistic forms and rhetorical structures could have a similar effect.

However, it is difficult to see how learners could apply these skills to texts that are not accompanied by this sort of previewing materials. While they might perform better on the classroom task, it is not possible to determine based on this research whether this would transfer to actual gains in reading proficiency.

Previewing for reading activities need not be limited to previewing for content, but could also include activities that help students anticipate the linguistic structures in the texts they read. It is possible that this could lead to improved reading comprehension.

These materials should be systematically evaluated in an experimental design in which the learners are monitored over time to determine what effect this intervention has on their reading comprehension of the texts that are previewed and on their reading proficiency in general. Such research should include a control group for comparison.

Petrimoulx, J. (1988). Sustained silent reading in an ESL class: A study. Chicago, IL: TESOL. (ERIC Document Reproduction No. 301 068).

The effects of Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) on ESL learners’ vocabulary development and reading comprehension. Most of the literature on SSR has focused on first language reading and has generally found SSR to be beneficial in improving reading comprehension, vocabulary, writing skills, and attitudes towards reading. The purpose of this study was to determine whether these results applied to second language reading as well.

Sixteen students from ten different countries (native languages unspecified) participated in this study. All of the students were enrolled in an intensive English program, and had TOEFL scores ranging from 475 to 525. This put them at a solid intermediate level. (600+ is generally considered passing out of need for academic English language preparation, 540 is acceptable for visas for health care workers.

At the beginning of the study, all the participants completed an in-house reading comprehension test consisting of a one and one-half page reading followed by multiple-choice and true/false questions on the structure and content of the reading. The participants also completed the vocabulary section of the Comprehensive English Language Test (CELT).

The participants were divided into three groups: one experimental group and two control groups. The SSR consisted of reading from self-selected materials and then participating in a class discussion of vocabulary from their individual readings. The class examined about five words and submitted them to a word “bank” for the class. At the end of each week, the experimental group received a list of the week’s vocabulary words along with their dictionary definitions and a sample sentence for each item.

At the end of the15- week semester, all the students retook the original tests. Additionally, a close-ended survey was administered to the experimental group students. The study investigated the students’ reactions to the SSR.

While the experimental group did improve both their reading comprehension scores and their vocabulary scores more than the two control groups, the differences between their performances were not significant. The questionnaire revealed, however, that at the end of the study the students who participated in SSR generally considered the experience very positive, indicating that they found it enjoyable and felt that they had improved their language proficiency from the reading experience.

While the study did not result in significant findings in favor of SSR in the classroom, it does give indications that it might be a beneficial experience for language learners in terms of vocabulary growth and increased reading comprehension. However, the size of the experimental group (five students) would make it impossible to extent the findings even if they had been significant. This effect would have been somewhat mitigated had two, rather than three groups been formed. Since there was no treatment for both control groups, it is unclear why two control groups were needed.

The researcher attributes the lack of significant results to the brevity of the study. One could also argue that the total treatment time was too restricted for significant differences to emerge (ten minutes of SSR a day for fifteen weeks is equivalent to twelve and one-half hours only of SSR). The study would have been perhaps stronger had more students been involved in SSR for a longer period of time each day over a longer study. While the findings indicate that SSR might be beneficial for the language development of ESL students, further research is needed. It is also important to remember that the discussions and class work surrounding the word bank, may also have contributed to the language development.

The survey data showed overall very high satisfaction with the use of SSR in the classroom. (Again, the satisfaction also may be with the word bank and class discussion of vocabulary.) However, with such a small number of students in the experimental group, it is unclear why open-ended questionnaires or interviews were not used to gather more qualitative data on the students’ view of the benefits that SSR had afforded them.

Engaging students in SSR might help them to increase their vocabulary and beneficially impact their language acquisition. The students in this study also enjoyed the SSR experience: it could possibly promote positive reading attitudes among ESL students. But, given the limited class time allotted to reading, it may not be the best use of precious class time. Maybe reading at home and keeping learner logs would be a better way to access the benefits of SSR.

This study should be replicated using a larger group of students and carrying out the experiment over a longer period of time. The experiment could also include the collection of more in-depth qualitative data.

Qian, D.D. (1999). Assessing the roles of depth and breadth of vocabulary knowledge in reading comprehension. The Canadian Modern Language Journal, 56, 262-305.

The relationships between breadth of vocabulary knowledge (the size of a students’ vocabulary), depth of vocabulary knowledge (how well a student knows a word) and reading comprehension. Most studies of vocabulary learning have focused on the relationship between the approximate size of a studen’s vocabulary and reading comprehension. However, knowing a word is more than knowing its meaning or gloss in the students’ native language. Depth of vocabulary refers to knowledge of pronunciation and spelling, morphological properties, syntactic properties, connotations, polysemy (multiple meanings for the same word), register (formal, informal), frequency, etc. This study attempted to determine what roles breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge played in reading comprehension.

Seventy-four students from intensive English centers in Canada participated in this study. All students included had a vocabulary of at least 3,000 word-families (commonly considered the minimum for reading ability in a second language). Only students who spoke Chinese or Korean as their first language were included in order to minimize cognate affects, and only students who had completed high school were included, so all students had similar levels of L1 literacy.

The students were administered four tests. First, they took a test of their vocabulary size to determine the breadth of their vocabulary knowledge. This test was adapted from the Vocabulary Levels Test, which has been used extensively in vocabulary research. The second test was a reading comprehension test based on a shortened reading section of the TOEFL, consisting of four passages and twenty multiple-choice comprehension questions. This test was given to establish reading comprehension levels for the students, in order to determine whether there was any relationship between reading comprehension and vocabulary breadth and depth. The third test, for examining vocabulary depth, was a modified version of the Word Associates Format. On each item of this test, a word from the second and third thousand word lists is given as the stimulus. For each word, students are asked to select synonyms from a list of four words, and to select words that appear with the stimulus in collocations from a separate list of four words. For both synonyms and collocations there can be one to three correct answers in the list to minimize the effects of guessing. Finally, the students completed a test of morphological knowledge. The test consisted of ten stimulus words, each of which had either a prefix or a suffix. Students were asked to define the parts of the word, and to explain if and how the affix changed the part of speech of the word.

High, positive correlations were found for scores on all of the tests. Extremely high correlations were found between the depth of vocabulary measure and reading comprehension and between depth and breadth of vocabulary. Multiple regression analysis indicated that depth of vocabulary knowledge accounted for an additional 11% of reading comprehension scores beyond that which was accounted for by breadth of vocabulary. The findings demonstrate both that the depth of vocabulary is related to the breadth of vocabulary, and that both of these areas of vocabulary knowledge have an extensive impact on reading comprehension.

The study clearly explains the importance of vocabulary learning to reading in second language and of considering both the depth and breadth of vocabulary knowledge when examining the impact of vocabulary knowledge on second language learning. However, since all the learners have vocabularies above the 3,000 word-family level, it does not give evidence of the importance of these areas of vocabulary knowledge for lower-level learners, or if the relationship is the same. Also, there was not enough variation among learners in terms of proficiency on any of the measures to draw developmental conclusions from the data. We do not know how these kinds of vocabulary knowledge are acquired in the process of learning a second language.

The measure for vocabulary depth is also somewhat problematic. Since half of the test was based on student understanding of word meanings, the material tested overlapped with the material tested on the vocabulary size test. As such, it is not surprising that the two correlate highly. Since the research considers and explains many different aspects of depth of vocabulary knowledge, it is perplexing that more were not included in the measure of vocabulary depth.

Both the size of students’ vocabularies and the depth of their vocabulary knowledge may affect reading comprehension. Teachers should help students become aware of different aspects of vocabulary knowledge. This could include pointing out polysemy or morphological aspects of the words, or explaining appropriate registers or frequency of use for new words.

The other areas of depth of vocabulary knowledge could be assessed to determine how knowledge of pragmatics, frequency, pronunciation, and discourse features influences reading comprehension.

Robson, B. (1982). Hmong literacy formal education, and their effects on performance in an ESL class. In B. T. Downing & D. P. Olney, (Eds.), The Hmong in the west: Observations and reports (pp. 201- 225). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota.

The effects of Hmong literacy in a Roman alphabet on student performance in a three-month English as a second language and cultural orientation programs (ESL/CO) at a refugee camp in Thailand.

The learners involved in this study were adult Hmong English language learners at the Ban Vanai refugee camp in Loei Province, Thailand. Prior to the ESL/CO course they were judged to have no English proficiency. Hmong literacy was tested with the Roman alphabet, the alphabet used by Hmong refugees at Ban Vanai and in most western countries as well. The other languages the refugees might be literate in – Thai or Lao – do not use the Roman alphabet.

The goal of this study was to determine the effects of Hmong literacy in a Roman alphabet on student performance in a three-month English as a second language (ESL) and cultural orientation (CO) program.

Students registered for the ESL/CO program by filling out an information card and by taking a very simple placement test to judge their knowledge of English and their ability to write in Lao, Hmong, Thai, or English.

Additional information was collected on students registering for this study. They were asked information about prior education and whether or not they could read Lao or Hmong. They were also asked to read short Hmong passages aloud and the reading was rated by interviewers. All the interviewing was done in Hmong, by native speakers who had been trained to collect personal data and to give and score the reading tests. One of the interviewers was also a Hmong reading teacher at the camp. His expertise and status facilitated the collecting of more accurate personal data than Hmong usually gave to outsiders.

One-hundred and fourteen subjects were chosen, using only those who had learned no English prior to the ESL/CO program they were going to enroll in. For purposes of the study, differences in English acquisition of the following four groups would be looked at:

The students were then divided into classes according to their oral English proficiency and received ESL/CO instruction from American teachers who had varying amounts of experience and formal training for 12-weeks.

1. The English Comprehension Test – a multiple-choice test to assess listening comprehension of non-literate or newly literate ESL students. The test was the “Ann and Ben” test, a test developed by the Oregon Indo-Chinese Refugee Program. In order to eliminate cross-cultural problems in interpreting visuals, the test utilizes line drawings, which are taught to the students in their native language first, as a part of the test. Then an English sentence is read out loud by the test giver and the student marks the one picture of three that best corresponds to the sentence.

2.The English Reading Test – an adaptation of the Ann and Ben test. This test was given immediately after the comprehension test and differed from that test in that the student had to read the sentences rather than listen to them. The same English content was tested in the comprehension and reading tests, and the same visuals were used. However, the actual test items differed from the comprehension to the reading test.

3. The English Production Test – a variation of the John Test, a standardized oral production test widely used in refugee programs in the U.S. at the time of this study. This test consisted of a pre-test in which students were asked questions they had been taught in class and the John Test – a standardized oral production test widely used in refugee programs in the United States in the early 1980s.

4. The Hmong Reading Test. In this test, participants were asked to individually read out loud a passage written in Hmong, using the Roman alphabet. They were scored on how fluently they could decode the written material.

5. The Hmong Writing Test. This test had three parts: the first required the student to write his name in English and Hmong spelling, his refugee number, and his address in camp. The second part was a dictation of letters and numbers in Hmong. The third part was dictated sentences in Hmong.

Of the original 114 participants,those remaining to be post-tested were as follows:

Robson examined the effect of Hmong literacy education on each of the English test separately and on the overall English score (which was the average of the three tests) by means of a two-way analysis of variance. She found that Hmong literacy and formal education both significantly increased scores on the English tests. The scores of those in group A – participants with neither Hmong literacy nor previous educational experience – were significantly lower than those in groups B, C, and D in all three tests: listening comprehension, reading, and production. In addition, the scores of those in group D were significantly higher than those in group C in “production” or speaking. On a standard ESL scale the subjects’ English language proficiency at the end of the course was designated to range from still almost zero (for group A) to high beginning or low intermediate (for the others).

1. The ability to read, in either Hmong or English, appeared to have a major impact on the acquisition of English. Lack of formal education did not appear to have as great an effect as lack of literacy. In addition, the learners who had no literacy in Hmong and no formal education learned very little English.

2. A second finding is that the subjects who could read Hmong but had not been to school did not score significantly lower than those who could read Hmong and who had been to school. Literacy in Hmong appeared to help them to learn English as much as previous educational experience did.

3. A third finding is among those who had formal education, those who could read in Hmong scored significantly better than those who could not.

Of special interest is that fact that some of the subjects could read Hmong, having learned it at the refugee camp, but had never had formal education – which for this study meant school in Laos. Similarly, some who had had formal education, could not read in Hmong, their native language, but perhaps had some literacy in Lao, Thai, Hmong, or English. As literacy is virtually always a result of formal education, the situation with the Hmong at Ban Vanai was unique.

The researcher in this study states some limitations of the study very clearly. She stresses that it is not clear why those learners who had Hmong literacy learned more English than those who did not: whether it was the fact that the literacy was in the native language or that it was from a language using a Roman alphabet.

Robson also points out that individuals who had learned some English prior to this program were not evaluated for this study. Because the placement test given by the consortium that provided the ESL/CO instruction was not sufficiently detailed or controlled to be use as a before and after proficiency test, Robson chose to look only at those learners who had no English prior to the study. This means that individuals who might be motivated to pick up English on their own and from self-study were eliminated. The findings, then can only apply to the effects of literacy and education on attempts to learn English in a formal classroom environment.

Another limitation of the study, also discussed by Robson, is the small number of participants. Robson found statistically significant differences in the scores of the post-tests of those who had Hmong literacy prior to ESL instruction and those who did not. However, only 44 participants remained (due both to attrition and the failure of the original pre-test given by the ESL/CO program at the camp to weed out those students who knew some English before they entered the program) provide the data for the two-way and the one-way analysis of variance tests.

All that said, the finding of the study – the boost in learning English received by those with Hmong literacy – is exciting.

Since learners who have literacy in their native language, or, at least in a language with a Roman alphabet, those learning English with this literacy will progress more rapidly than those who do not. Those without this literacy then, should be taught in separate classes where they can receive the literacy instruction. It seems that Hmong speakers would benefit from literacy instruction in Hmong prior to learning English.

Looking at non-literate learners with other native languages, it seems that literacy instruction in the native language would facilitate their learning English, provided that the native language also used the Roman alphabet.

To expand the findings of this study, it would need to be replicated with learners from language groups that do not use the Roman alphabet. It hardly needs to be said, however, that it would be hard to replicate the situation of the Hmong adult learners in a refugee camp in Thailand – where they are not exposed to the target language in environmental print and where they have few of the constraints of time and other responsibilities adults living and working in U.S. society have. It would be hard to declare with as much authority that it is the effects of the native language literacy that improves English acquisition, rather than literacy in the Roman alphabet. When studies are done, pre and post test scores should be collected, and there should be a large number of participants taking the test.

Rumelhart, D.E. (1985). Toward an interactive model of reading. In H. Singer & R.B. Ruddell (Eds.) Theoretical models and processes of reading (pp. 722-750). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

The nature of the reading process in an interactive processing model. Many previous researchers developed bottom-up processing models (explaining the reading process in terms of reading first letters, then words, then sentences, etc.) or top-down models (characterizing the reading process as a guessing process based on readers’ language knowledge and background knowledge), Rumelhart sought to build a model that integrated the top-down and bottom-up processing simultaneously.

In the interactive model, guessing based on reader knowledge occurs neither before text processing nor after it. Rather, reader knowledge processing occurs simultaneously to text processing and the two interact constantly to illuminate meaning. This means that our perceptions of words depends on the syntactic and semantic environment in which they are found (the word and our syntactic/semantic knowledge are simultaneously processed), our perceptions of syntax depends on the semantic environment, and our interpretation of meaning depends on the general context of the text itself. In Rumelhart’s model, visual input from the text is brought into a processing center. At the same time, syntactic knowledge, semantic knowledge, orthographic knowledge, and lexical knowledge are brought into the processing center, which uses all this input to arrive at the most logical meaning for the passage.

Rumelhart’s model is able to explain several different reading phenomena. For example, when subjects are presented with words and asked to spell the words aloud, they are more likely to correctly spell the word when it contains only legal letter strings, and to change the order of letters in words containing illegal letter strings (for English, these could include words beginning with non-English clusters like rp or with a non-English diphthong like uo). This indicates that word-level knowledge of the language is processed along with the orthographic input from the text. For example, miscue analysis consistently shows that readers are much more likely to substitute a grammatically possible word than a grammatically impossible word, showing that syntactic knowledge was co-processed with the textual input. Other studies have found that miscues are also overwhelmingly semantically possible. Also, studies have shown that proficient readers normally only process one possible interpretation of syntactically ambiguous sentences and are most often unaware of other interpretations of the sentences because of semantic cues in the sentence. This indicates that the syntax from the text and semantic knowledge are processed simultaneously. Rumelhart gives extensive examples of other research findings that are explainable by an interactive model.

Rumelhart clearly explains the research that indicates the need for an interactive model of the reading process. While the research has focused to a large extent on top-down processing, Rumelhart explicates the importance of inclusion of both top-down and bottom-up processing. Since Rumelhart’s focus is reading in general, he does not explain how this process might be different for second language readers. For the normally developing L1 reader, the features of spoken language that undergird R’s model are readily available-but not as readily or consistently available to L2 readers. However, his explanation of the reading process is complete, concise, and thought-provoking.

In reading instruction for native and non-native speakers, top-down and bottom-up processing need to be addressed. Reading will not be successful until the reader has both sufficient language and topic knowledge to process the text, and sufficient letter and word recognition skills to rapidly integrate these sources of input. Reading instruction should take the various interacting components of reading into consideration.

Much of the research Rumelhart cites could be replicated using ESL students to learn how second language reading differs from first language reading.

Ryan, A. & Meara, P. (1991). The case of the invisible vowels: Arabic speakers reading English words. Reading in a Foreign Language, 7(2), 531-540.

Three groups of subjects participated in this study: ten Arabic speaking intermediate-level adult ESL students, ten non-Arabic intermediate-level adult ESL students, and ten adult native speakers of English. All were at University College of Swansea, in Wales.

The subjects all participated in a computer task in which they were presented with ten-letter frequent English words from the Thorndike and Lorge AA to 20 per million categories. 100 words in total were used in the task. Each word was presented on the computer screen for one second, then blanked out. After two seconds, the subjects were again shown the same word either spelled correctly or with one vowel removed. Forty of the words were shown spelled correctly; sixty were missing one vowel. The vowel could be deleted from the second position (the second grapheme in the correctly spelled word), the fourth position, the sixth position, or the eighth position. The subjects were asked to indicate whether the two presentations for each were identical or not by pressing a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ key on the keyboard.

The Arabic speakers were significantly less accurate than either of the other groups in recognizing that vowels had been deleted. They also performed the task significantly slower than the other groups. All the groups completed the tasks significantly faster and more accurately when the vowels were deleted from the second and fourth positions than when they were removed from later word positions.

The study is well designed and controlled, but it is difficult to see exactly how recognizing missing vowels is important in reading. If the study had sought a link between Arabic learners performance on this task and their reading comprehension, there would be evidence that this is an important factor in second language reading for Arabic speakers. As this was not done, the application of this research to reading is somewhat unclear.

It is likely that intraword processing of Arabic speakers is different than that of other ESL learners, and it is possible that this affects their ESL reading comprehension, but this link remains to be demonstrated. Teachers should be aware that L1 orthographic systems may influence ESL readers’ lexical processing, but it is unclear what, if any, interventions should be employed.

Researchers should determine whether the processing phenomenon tested here impacts ESL reading comprehension of L1 Arabic students. This could be done by comparing the performance of mixed reading ability Arabic ESL students on this measure with their reading comprehension, to determine whether there is a relationship between missing vowel recognition (and the processing strategy it represents) and reading comprehension.

Shanahan, T., Mulhern, M., & Rodriguez-Brown, F. (1995). Project FLAME: Lessons learned from a family literacy program for linguistic minority families. The Reading Teacher, 48, 586-93.

The effectiveness of a community-based ESL/family literacy program in encouraging Latino/a parents to share literacy with their children. There is evidence that parental involvement in children’s literacy can influence children’s scholastic achievement. These researchers created a program to help the parents of potentially at-risk children share literacy in their homes. The report details their program and successes.

The learners were all parents of children who attended school in one of the six Chicago elementary schools where the program was conducted over the course of five years. The schools were all located in heavily Latino neighborhoods in inner-city Chicago. Because of fear of gangs, the classes met in the mornings, so most of the participants were mothers who did not work during the day. The participants (number unspecified) were primarily Mexican and had varying levels of L1 Spanish literacy. All had very limited English literacy.

The teacher participants were a professor and graduate students involved in bilingual education and literacy studies. This research was supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Education and by the Kraft Foundation.

The researchers initially opened the program in one school and later moved to other schools in the area. In each program, parents of children between the ages of three and nine were recruited through the schools. They attended ESL classes twice a week, and attended additional Parents as Teachers classes twice a month. In the ESL classes, they were exposed to communicative language teaching to help them increase their English fluency; in the Parents as Teachers classes they were exposed to ideas for sharing literacy with their children. Some of the activities included finding books in a library, creating a home literacy center, and observing literacy instruction in their child’s school.

Before each Parents as Teachers class, the students were prepared for the content in their ESL class. The Parents as Teachers classes were conducted in Spanish. In each class of these classes, the teacher researchers presented information on the literacy building techniques, demonstrated activities, practiced them with the parents, and discussed how the parents could implement the activities at home. Then, the parents were assigned to try out the activities they had learned at home with their children. Follow-up on the activities was conducted weekly in the ESL classes.

The researchers gathered qualitative data on the success of the project through student feedback, feedback from the teachers and administrators at the elementary schools, and through their own observations of the program.

The parents involved in the courses became very excited about sharing literacy activities with their children. They felt more comfortable accessing literacy materials from libraries, book sales, and the elementary schools and felt more confident in selecting books for their children in both Spanish and English. Many parents reported initiating patterns of daily reading with their children, and reported that their children were more interested in books and reading as a result of this sharing.

Teachers from the elementary schools felt that the students whose parents participated in the family literacy program progressed more quickly in reading at school and had more positive attitudes towards literacy. Administrators from those schools also noted that parents who participated in the program were more likely to become involved in their children’s school activities. They reported that parents seemed to be more comfortable in the school environment.

The report gives a clear explanation of the program and its goals and some good indications that it was perceived as being very positive. While there is no systematic data collection or any indication of the impact of the program on the parents’ ESL literacy, it does raise the possibility that the inclusion of intensive family literacy efforts in adult ESL education could have a positive influence on the literacy development for both parents and children.

It cannot be assumed that simply teaching parents to read or showing them children’s books will have a positive impact on their children’s literacy development. For adult literacy to filter down to children, parents must be exposed to activities and techniques for sharing literacy with their children. It is possible that learning experiences that help parents understand how to share literacy with their children could increase successful family literacy.

An in-depth case study of this type of program could be conducted, employing pre- and post-treatment assessment measures for the literacy development of both parents and children. Such a study could also systematically document changed family reading behaviors during the program.

Strucker, J. (1997) What silent reading tests alone can’t tell you. Focus on Basics, 1 (B), 13-17.

The reading strengths and needs of different types of readers who test at the same level on silent reading comprehension tests. For this study, a native speaker and a non-native speaker of English who tested at the same intermediate level on an English reading comprehension test were compared to exemplify the different learner profiles in adult literacy programs.

The native speaker was a male in his twenties named Richard. Because his family had moved often in his childhood, Richard’s reading difficulties were not diagnosed until he was in late middle school. He eventually dropped out of high school in order to help his family financially. After working in a number of jobs, he wished to earn a high school degree to join the military.

The ESL student was a female in her early twenties named Vanessa, a Peruvian immigrant who had dropped out of high school. She had completed beauty school, but did not posses a high enough level of English literacy to pass the licensing test. She wished to enter a job-training program.

The teacher was a researcher for a national reading foundation who had more than ten years experience working with native speakers and ESL learners in adult basic education literacy programs. He completed this research as part of a larger study of the profiles of adult basic education learners in the United States.

The learners completed several testing measures with the researcher, including a silent comprehension test, an oral reading, an oral vocabulary assessment, a spelling test, and tests of word analysis and word recognition. The researcher also noted their placement into classes in the adult education center and followed their progress.

As was mentioned, based on the silent reading comprehension test, the two learners were at the same level and would have been placed in the same class. The other measures, however, revealed significant differences in their reading behavior and needs. Richard had excellent meaning-based skills. He was able to resolve oral miscues, for example, based on context, and had strong oral vocabulary skills. However, his print-based skills were very weak. He had difficulty decoding, as evidenced by low word analysis and word recognition scores, and his low scores in spelling. While his silent reading comprehension score alone would have placed him in an intermediate class, he really needed more basic decoding and spelling practice to develop reading fluency and accuracy. In this setting, Richard began to progress in both meaning-based and print-based skills.

Vanessa had an opposite balance of skills. Her print-based skills, specifically spelling and word recognition were quite high, and the majority of her errors seemed to be prompted by her native language, Spanish. However, her comprehension scores were impaired by low vocabulary. Her need for increased vocabulary was also underscored by lower oral vocabulary scores. Thus, while Vanessa’s print-based skills were quite good, a limited vocabulary impeded her reading comprehension. She needed different instruction than Richard; her profile indicated that she required extensive reading and vocabulary building. She received this in an intermediate class and in additional ESL classes offered at the center.

The researcher relates these finding to those of his larger study, indicating that Vanessa’s profile is very typical of certain adult ESL students, while Richard’s is typical of certain native speakers.

The study is reported with rich detail and makes a convincing case for the use of multiple assessments, rather than just silent reading comprehension tests, for the placement of ESL and native speaker adults in reading programs, as well as explaining the need for specialized instruction for different learner types and for not putting them in the same class just because they test the same on a silent reading comprehension test. It effectively illustrates the fact that not all learners at a similar comprehension level have the same needs, and that silent reading comprehension tests alone will not be able to uncover the differences between learners of different profiles.

Multiple assessments should be employed when placing students in literacy programs. The use of oral reading and vocabulary assessments are especially helpful in determining which students only have difficulties with the language, and which also have difficulties with reading.

While the researcher of this article is currently extending the research to a large population of adult basic education literacy learners, it could also be extended to ESL adult literacy students. The effects of educational background, native language literacy, and cultural background on literacy profiles could be considered.

Strucker, J. & Davidson, R. (in press) Adult reading components study (ARCS). Boston: National Center for the Study of Adult Learning.

Reading profiles of adult education students (both native and non-native speakers of English) in the United States.

Six –hundred seventy-seven adult basic education learners and 278 ESL learners at learning centers in seven states. 219 of the ESOL learners spoke Spanish as their L1. Of the Spanish speaking ESOL learners, 80% had an average of 12-13 years of education, 14% had an average of 8 years of education, and 5% had an average of 6.5 years of education in their native language, and appeared reading disabled in Spanish.

All the participants completed a battery of reading proficiency tests. These included measures of silent reading comprehension, oral reading, spelling, word recognition, word analysis, phonemic awareness, automaticity, and short-term memory. The Spanish-speaking participants also completed Spanish word recognition, oral vocabulary, and reading comprehension tests.

The highest cluster of Spanish-speakers in terms of prior education in their native language had high levels of vocabulary, decoding, and comprehension in Spanish. The Spanish-speakers with less educational background tended to have lower Spanish vocabulary and reading comprehension. The Spanish-speakers with the least educational background had very weak decoding skills in Spanish and appeared to be reading disabled. They also tended to have not acquired English reading skills, vocabulary, and listening comprehension.

However, even the Spanish-speakers with high literacy levels in their L1 had difficulties in some aspects of English decoding, especially letter sounds in isolation, despite having, on average, several years of ESOL classes.

This research looks at reading proficiency both in the L1 and L2. The numbers of students being studied is large enough to have importance. Of great interest is the fact that it assesses and provides data on a fact that many ESL teachers have known anecdotally: unlike the native speaker adult basic education (ABE) population, the percentage of adult English language learners who are learning disabled is probably no greater than that of the general population.

Even highly literate students may need instruction and practice in some basic English decoding skills, especially at the phoneme level. Learning English letter sounds could help them attend to small differences that affect meaning, especially morphosyntactic information at the ends of English words, and it might help them to be more successful at English pronunciation. Also, given that 80% of the Spanish speakers tested had high school or above levels of Spanish reading, some of these students could perhaps benefit from a faster-paced track in ESL, one more geared to take advantage of their L1 literacy skills and relatively high levels of L1 education.

Different methods of decoding instruction could be designed to help previously literate students transfer decoding skills from their first language to the second. The effectiveness of such methods should be empirically tested.

Tan, A., Moore, D.W., Dixon, R.S., Nicholson, T. (1994). Effects of training in rapid decoding on the reading comprehension of adult ESL learners. Journal of Behavioral Education, 4, 177-189.

Three learners participated in this study. All the subjects were recent immigrants to New Zealand who were studying ESL. Three different L1 language backgrounds were represented as the subjects came from Japan, China, and Cambodia. At the beginning of the study, their scores on the Neale Analysis of Reading Behavior indicated that they read at an age-equivalent of 7-9 for reading rate, 6-7 for accuracy, and 6-7 for comprehension.

The study was designed as a multiple-baseline study, in which all the participants completed multiple assessments of their reading behavior over time. The assessments and treatments were centered on reading passages that the researchers prepared. Each of the fifteen passages was rated at the seventh- grade level. For each passage, the researchers prepared a word list of 25 words from the passage that the researchers thought the subjects might find difficult. Comprehension tests consisting of ten text-explicit and two text-implicit questions were prepared by the researchers.

All participants attended three treatment/experimental sessions a week for five weeks. The sessions were conducted by the first author in a one-on-one setting.

In the initial baseline sessions, the participants were given the word list and asked to read it out loud. Errors in accuracy and elapsed time were recorded. Then the readers were given the passage and asked to read it aloud. They were informed that comprehension questions would follow. Errors in accuracy and elapsed time for the oral reading were also recorded. Following the reading, the subjects orally answered the orally-administered comprehension questions.

For the treatment sessions, words from the word lists were printed on note cards. The participants practiced with the cards in flashcard style until they could recognize all the words in one second or less. They were then given the words in list form and were required to read the list accurately at a rate of one and one-half second or less per word. If they were unable to do this, they reviewed the flashcards again. They then read the text aloud and answered the comprehension questions.

For the final week of the treatment sessions, the researchers initiated the reversal stage, which was an exact return to the baseline procedures.

The participants all decreased the mean time per word for reading words in the vocabulary lists during the treatment phase of the study, but during the reversal phase returned to the baseline speeds, indicating that the treatment did not affect their reading speed for reading new words in isolation. However, their reading speed overall for reading the passages decreased during the intervention stage of the study and remained lower during the reversal stage, indicating that practicing reading at faster speeds did help the participants to increase their overall reading speed.

In terms of accuracy, the participants were most accurate in their reading of the words both on the lists and in the passages during the treatment stage of the study. During the reversal stage, their accuracy scores returned to the baseline levels. The comprehension scores followed a similar pattern—the participants significantly improved their comprehension scores during the treatment phase of the study, but during the reversal phase their comprehension scores returned to near-baseline levels.

The authors conclude that the lasting benefit of the treatment was in the increased reading speed, the only improvement that the readers generalized to readings when the treatment was not given. They attribute the gains in reading speed to the volume of the English reading practice that the students engaged in, not specifically to the treatment itself. They conclude overall that the study of word lists before reading only improves reading speed, accuracy, and comprehension on the passages associated with the lists, and that these benefits are not generalized to reading other texts.

The study had some good design features, the statistics wer well explained, and the findings responsibly interpreted. However, an experimental study of only three subjects can hardly yield significant, generalizable results.

The lack of results for the treatment could possibly be attributed to the lack of recycling in the vocabulary use. It is possible that students could generalize the reading comprehension gains from improving rapid word decoding if the words they practiced with were recycled in subsequent readings. The researchers established that these skills do not generalize to new words. It would interesting to see if the improved decoding time would be maintained with the same words in new contexts.

The study indicates that the benefits of improving vocabulary recognition before reading are not generalized to reading overall. This indicates that, at least without recycling, work with word lists may not be a productive activity for improving reading comprehension.

A similar study, with more subjects, could recycle the words studied in the treatment phase in the reversal phase, to see if accuracy, speed, and comprehension gains from studying word lists are maintained when the same words appear in new contexts.

Thuy, V.G. (1992). High-tech for effective ESL/family literacy instruction. Harrisburg, VA: Pennsylvania State Department of Education. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 356 683).

The effects of utilizing CD-ROM software in a community ESL literacy program for limited English proficient adults. The study was conducted to determine what the benefits and drawbacks of using this technology were measured in terms of language acquisition, retention, and attendance. The purpose of the study was to aid future teachers, tutors, and lab instructors in the use of technology in ESL literacy programs.

Thirty refugee and immigrant ESL students from Southeast Asia participated in the study. All of the students completed pre-tests of vocabulary and comprehension for each of the stories used in the computer programs. The researchers attempted to divide the students into groups with equivalent mean scores, but they allowed students in the end to self-group. The result was an intermediate experimental group (pre-test mean=56.67), and roughly equivalent beginning level experimental (pre-test mean=3.19) and control (pre-test mean=3.13) groups.

All of the teachers participating in the study were teachers from the Indochinese-American Council. They all had extensive experience in ESL literacy instruction in multilingual classes.

The pre-tests and division into experimental and control groups occurred at the beginning of the fifteen week semester. The classes met for two hours three days a week throughout the semester. The first hour of every class for both groups was spent on general ESL instruction. The experimental group spent the second hour of each class in the computer lab using CD-ROM software designed to build ESL literacy skills. For the control group, the second hour of each class was spent working on literacy using paper versions of the CD-ROM content. Post-tests, exit interviews, and questionnaires were completed at the end of the semester.

To report the findings, the experimental group was split into two groups: beginning and intermediate. No similar split was made with the control group, which by the end of the report is characterized as beginning level. The beginning experimental group improved their scores on vocabulary and comprehension more than either the intermediate experimental group or the control group. The intermediate experimental group improved their vocabulary scores more than the control group as well. These effects could have been due to the level of the instructional material. If the material was more suited to the beginners, the intermediates wouldn’t have had that much to learn from it, and so would not have showed gains.

From the questionnaires and the exit interviews, it was found that the learners who participated in the experimental group viewed the experience very positively. They all expressed interest in continuing to study using technology. The researcher also noted that the technology had been effective in eliciting speaking from otherwise shy learners. He also noted that the use of technology was a positive experience because most of the learners had little access to computer equipment, and viewed the program as a chance to gain both language and computer skills.

There is no explanation given for splitting the experimental group into two groups by proficiency but not doing the same for the control group. If the groups were really formed at the beginning of the study such that the distribution of scores was similar between groups, there should have been no reason for dividing them. If the control group really was a beginning level group, then this group can only act as a control for the beginning level experimental group, and there is thus no adequate control for the intermediate experimental group. It is impossible to determine whether their gains were the result of the exposure to computer technology or the result of the pre-program proficiency level.

Dividing the experimental group also meant that there were two fewer members in each group to perform inferential statistics. We cannot tell from this study whether the improvements are significant, nor whether the differences among the performance of the different groups were significant.

The qualitative review of the participants’ interviews, while not reported with very rich detail, did give interesting insights into some of the perceived advantages of integrating technology into an adult ESL literacy setting. Predictably, the subjects themselves liked using the computers.

Supplementing ESL literacy with technology can increase student motivation in literacy learning. It can also add to literacy learning an increased confidence in using technology, which is increasingly important for progression in the workplace. Possibly, the incorporation of technology into ESL literacy classes can contribute to accelerated learning.

This sort of study could be replicated using more modern technology, such as some of the web-based programs directed toward ESL learners. A replication could either employ more rigorous pre- and post-test measures and statistics or could gather more in-depth detail on student reactions to working with technology.

Tse, L. (1996a). When an ESL adult becomes a reader. Reading Horizons, 37, 16-29.

The personal and behavioral changes an ESL adult student experiences when introduced to pleasure reading. Helping students’ change their reading behavior by encouraging them to read more and to focus on meaning is hypothesized to increase their language development by massively increasing their exposure to input. The researcher wanted to know what specific motivational and behavioral changes a learner would experience during this experience.

This is a case study of one student participant in a reading class in an intensive ESL program. The participant was an Indonesian woman who had come to the United States with her husband and children to study English in order to eventually pursue a master’s degree at an American university. Although she had studied English for many years, she had never read books in English and had never engaged in English pleasure reading at all. She also rarely read for pleasure in her native language.

The teacher researcher of this study was the teacher of the extensive reading class mentioned and had designed the syllabus for the class. Her teaching philosophy for literacy centered on the benefits of extensive reading with a focus on meaning. She instructed her students to read quickly and guess the meanings of new words, rather than using dictionaries, in order to increase their exposure to input. She also acted as an individual tutor for the participant in this study, meeting with her twice a week for two months following the end of the four-month course.

Data were collected through the participant observations of the practitioner researcher during classes and through interviews with the participant over the six months of the course and tutoring. At the first of the course, the researcher asked the participant about her reading habits and attitudes toward reading in her language and in English. During several of the tutoring sessions following the course, the researcher and the participant returned to this theme and to the ways in which the participants’ reading behavior and attitudes had changed. Data from interviews and observation were recorded in notes taken by the researcher.

At the beginning of the study, the participant felt uncomfortable reading and unsure of her ability to understand the readings. She indicated that she had liked reading, and initially did not participate much in the in-class discussions of the reading. When she began to participate in class, her comments were mostly language-focused questions. After a few weeks, however, she began to engage more in discussions of the issues raised in the readings.

The interview data were analyzed according to three categories of comments: opinion and value, feeling, and knowledge. The participant indicated that throughout her participation in the class, her opinion of reading as a part of language learning had changed. While before the class she had considered reading to be secondary to grammar and vocabulary study in language learning, by the end of the course she considered reading to be the best way for her to learn English and to improve her vocabulary, spelling, and writing skills. In terms of feeling, or her emotional response to the reading experience, she felt that she had overcome unproductive strategies such as the overuse of the dictionary and that she had become confident in her ability to read in English. She also felt that the books had increased her knowledge of American culture and beliefs, which gave her new insights into her own culture. The researcher also noted that the participant had significantly increased her reading ability. Whereas she began the semester struggling with third-grade-level books, she ended the semester reading seventh-grade-level books comfortably. That is gain of four grade levels in less than six months.

This is a one-participant case study. Care should be taken in generalizing findings beyond this participant. However, the researcher supplies rich detail on the participant’s attitudes and beliefs about reading, as well as her classroom behavior and reported reading behavior. It is a good window into the personal and behavior are changes a learner may experience when engaging in reading in a second language. Having adult ESL learners read and talk about literature, poetry, and art (to supplement acquiring functional English) can make the process of being a newcomer and a new language learner less “infantilizing” and more adult.

This study indicates that introducing ESL adult students to pleasure reading can help them to alter their reading attitudes, reading behavior, and reading proficiency in a positive manner. It indicates that students as well as teachers can come to see pleasure reading as a legitimate language learning experience.

This research could be replicated with a larger number of participants. Also, language-based pre- and post-testing could also be introduced to quantify the effects of pleasure reading on language development.

Tse, L. (1996b). If you lead horses to water they will drink: Introducing second language adults to books in English. California Reader, 29 (2), 14-17.

The effectiveness of an approach to introducing second language adults to reading in English. The approach involved explaining the importance of reading in language development to the students, helping students comprehend popular novels, and helping students to read more effectively.

The learners were ten adult intermediate and advanced ESL students in a community language course that met for thirty hours over ten weeks. The ten students chose to take the course because they wanted to improve their reading ability. None of the students had ever read a book in English.

In the first stage of the class, the teacher discussed with them some research on second language reading that indicates that reading facilitates language development, and then explained the notion of implicit learning (learning from comprehensible input) to the students to help motivate them throughout the project. Then, the teacher shared some ideas with them to help make reading more enjoyable. These suggestions were all directed to reading more quickly, fluently, and frequently. The class read six novels during the course. The teacher chose the first two and then allowed the students examine other books and choose as a class the remaining four novels they would read. During the course, the class participated in activities and discussions centered on the issues and themes of the stories they were reading. Each week, the students were asked to write briefly about their experiences with the reading and the difficulties they encountered.

The students reported progress in their level of comfort while reading in English as the semester progressed. They reported that they had become interested in the reading and were relying less on the dictionary. While all of the students had good sentence processing skills at the beginning of the study, some noted that their ability to comprehend the text as a whole had increased. Their increased fluency decreased the frustration of reading for them. Students also reported that reading was easier when they were interested in the topic. Many indicated that they planned to continue reading in English after the semester ended.

The study indicates that exposure to English novels and an understanding of the importance of developing literacy to developing language skills can motivate students to change their reading practices and their attitudes about reading. The study does not indicate that this program influences students’ language development, as no language assessment measure was used.

Students’ motivation to read, confidence in themselves as readers, and reading habits can be affected by extensive reading of books that students find interesting. Reading instructors should find books that appeal to their students’ interests. Instructors should, as did the teacher in the study, explain the rationale for our instruction to our students, thus taking advantage of their adult metacognitive abilities and making them more self-conscious learners.

This study should be replicated to include assessment measures, so the effect of the reading experience on the student’s language development can be better assessed.

Packard, B. W-L. (2001). When your mother asks for another book: Fostering intergenerational exchange of culturally relevant books. The Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 44 (7), 626-633.

Pakenham, K.J. (1983). Developing expectations for text in adult beginning ESL readers. Toronto, Canada: On TESOL ’83. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. 275148)

Petrimoulx, J. (1988). Sustained silent reading in an ESL class: A study. Chicago, IL: TESOL. (ERIC Document Reproduction No. 301 068).

Qian, D.D. (1999). Assessing the roles of depth and breadth of vocabulary knowledge in reading comprehension. The Canadian Modern Language Journal, 56, 262-305.

Robson, B. (1982). Hmong literacy formal education, and their effects on performance in an ESL class. In B. T. Downing & D. P. Olney, (Eds.), The Hmong in the west: Observations and reports (pp. 201- 225). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota.

Rumelhart, D.E. (1985). Toward an interactive model of reading. In H. Singer & R.B. Ruddell (Eds.) Theoretical models and processes of reading (pp. 722-750). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

**Ryan, A. & Meara, P. (1991). The case of the invisible vowels: Arabic speakers reading English words. Reading in a Foreign Language, 7(2), 531-540.**

Shanahan, T., Mulhern, M., & Rodriguez-Brown, F. (1995). Project FLAME: Lessons learned from a family literacy program for linguistic minority families. The Reading Teacher, 48, 586-93.

Strucker, J. (1997) What silent reading tests alone can’t tell you. Focus on Basics, 1 (B), 13-17.

Strucker, J. & Davidson, R. (in press) Adult reading components study (ARCS). Boston: National Center for the Study of Adult Learning.

Tan, A., Moore, D.W., Dixon, R.S., Nicholson, T. (1994). Effects of training in rapid decoding on the reading comprehension of adult ESL learners. Journal of Behavioral Education, 4, 177-189.

Thuy, V.G. (1992). High-tech for effective ESL/family literacy instruction. Harrisburg, VA: Pennsylvania State Department of Education. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 356 683).

Tse, L. (1996a). When an ESL adult becomes a reader. Reading Horizons, 37, 16-29.

Tse, L. (1996b). If you lead horses to water they will drink: Introducing second language adults to books in English. California Reader, 29 (2), 14-17.