It appears the biggest factor affecting grade improvement was not hours of instruction but the level of the learner. Beginner learners (level 2 and 3 on the scale) improved the most and were the least affected by the amount of instruction. Of those Low and High Beginners who had the least amount of instruction (between 2 and 60 hours), almost 75% stil managed to improve. For those who had between 140 and 512 hours of instruction, or at least three times as much instruction, the percentage who improved only went from 75% to 84%. The report also says that 78%, or almost four out of five of these Low and High Beginner learners improved regardless of the number of hours of instruction.
The largest group, those with essential y no English skil s (49%), as wel as the most advanced group (7%), showed the lowest level of improvement, but seemed to benefit the greatest from instruction. The report does not explain this or the fact that the rate of improvement sometimes declines with increased instruction.
Intensity of instruction does not have a great affect on results. The largest group (57%) studied an average of 4.5 hours per week and 61% of these learners showed measurable improvement on the scale. However 31% of the survey group had less than 2.8 hours per week of instruction and yet 56% stil managed to improve. The intense group, roughly 12% of the learners, studied more than 9.3 hours per week. Despite more than double the hours of instruction, compared to the middle group, the percentage of learners with measurable improvement only increased from 61% to 66%. Again it was the Low and High Beginners who improved the most, with the least impact from instructional intensity.
To me the conclusion is that class instruction obviously does help, but not as much as CAL and teachers like to believe. Instead, I suspect that what real y matters is what the learner does outside the classroom. As the report says, an adult ESL learner has limited time to spend, "typical y 4 and 8 hours per week". Surely to help these learners it is better to focus on finding ways to enable these learners to create more time for learning. In other words we should find ways to make it easier and more effective for them to learn outside the classroom, and to encourage them to do so, instead of trying to justify bringing them to class. Classroom time does not seem to have a decisive impact on their improvement.
CHAPTER XI: LITERACY INSTRUCTION
There are many people, even in affluent societies, who do not read well. This is a serious handicap, professional y and personal y. A great deal of money and effort is expended on trying to raise literacy levels in al countries. This is a concern both in our schools, and in the field of adult education.
Literacy education, like much of language teaching, is dominated by people who are often more interested in the social implications of literacy, than in helping people read better. I do not believe this is helpful to solving what is a major problem.
Literacy means, to me, the ability to read and write. It is real y quite simple. What a person does with the ability to read is up to them. The most literate people are those who use the language well. Somewhere between 10 and 40% of the population in developed countries, (depending on definition) struggle to read and write well . People who have limited literacy skil s are now cal ed functional y ill iterate.
Literacy skill s are very closely related to professional success in a society. Some people cannot decode letters either because they did not learn to do so at school or because they have a learning disability. This is the minority. Most poor readers simply do not read enough.
We know from cognitive science research that the brain learns best from experience and example. For most people with poor literacy skills, simply reading more is the best way to improve reading skil s. Mostly this requires the motivation of the person involved.
We know from experience that it is easier to read content that is of interest and where the context is familiar. We also know that we can read words that are total y misspelled and jumbled if we have heard these words before, know them, and are familiar with the context.
Research has shown that there is a close connection between listening and reading. From an evolutionary perspective, our brains have been listening a lot longer than they have been reading.
So, it seems to me, for the vast majority of people with literacy problems, making available a large library of reading material for the learner to choose from, and making audio files of that material available, will be an inexpensive way to improve literacy skills. Some efficient way to look up new words, and to keep track of them, would also help. Dare I mention LingQ?
Teachers and professors involved in literacy teaching sometimes find the task of helping students to learn important language skills is less worthy of their talents than challenging certain mainstream social values. Here is what some teachers had to say on a forum on literacy.
The fol owing are extracts from discussions on an Internet forum of language and literacy teachers. While the heavy use of jargon makes it hard to understand what they are saying. It seems that they are more concerned about social injustice than how to improve people’s level of literacy. I think this is unfortunate.
"I believe that social change will continue to be hindered until society as a whole begins to recognize, value, and celebrate marginalized literacies & practices. I see part of my job as an instructor to make cracks in that which we "know" to be "Literacy". To keep an open mind and to encourage students to see the significance of their primary discourses. Just my 2 cents."
"Here's how I see it. Any notion of "L" (capital L) Literacy is a social construct, invariably tied to structures of power and inherently political. I choose to believe that there are many literacies tied to social/cultural transactional practices. Yet only certain ones are deemed valuable enough to be taught/reproduced in formal educational sites--typical y those that mirror the language-use norms of historical y elite populations.‖
"A critical issue has to do with reading the political cultures, including the politicization, of students that give shape to the formation of adult literacy programs and agencies, and the ranges of potentiality in working through the dynamics of critical adaptation (accepting the broad paradigms as broadly normative, but with the potentiality of substantial change within them (e.g. Obama) and radical change as implicit in the rhetoric (I'm using this term descriptively in the classical Greek sense rather than pejoratively) of your post which reflects the language of radical pedagogy.
"While I do not advocate illiteracy I advocate for a type [of] literacy that helps people to question, to think critical y, historical y, contextual y and a literacy that promotes care and respect for other human beings as brothers and sisters. Any attempt to teach literacy as a neutral instrument is essential y advocating the status quo. If you agree with it, then you are promoting that ideology. In preliterate societies where people are living without the introduction of industrialism, religion or other Eurocentric values, we should leave them be."