The Importance of Practice for
Literacy Development

There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that children's development of literacy skill across the school years results to a large extent from the reading they do outside of school (Anderson, Wilson, & Fielding, 1988; Stanovich, 1993). Anderson, et. al. reported a wide range of amount of reading of books, magazines, comics, and mail for fifth grade students in a year. Children at the 30th percentile of amount of out- of-school text reading read about 251,000 words a year. While children at the 70th percentile of amount of out-of-school reading read some 1,168,000 words a year. Amount of reading was significantly related to reading achievement.

Children in the 3rd through 6th grades with reading skills at the 25th percentile have been found to lose over the summer almost half of the skill they gain during the school year. While those at the 75th percentile actually gain skill over the summer (Barbara Heynes, as reported in Berlin & Sum, 1988, p. 37, Figure 10).

Among adults, higher levels of engagement in reading practices has been found to be associated with higher levels of education, vocabulary, and cultural knowledge, such as knowledge of names of famous authors, magazines, and other people (West, Stanovich, & Mitchell, 1993).

The combined evidence suggests that practice in reading, and especially the reading of books, is a potent contributor to the development of vast bodies of knowledge in long term memory and efficiency in word recognition and other aspects of the processing of language and graphic displays of information in working memory.

The low achievement gains in the pre- and post-test scores of adult literacy programs found in Part III of the Compendium may reflect low levels of practice in reading by students outside of the literacy programs (or, for that matter, inside the program. We have very little information on "time on task" in adult literacy classrooms or learning centers). To date there is very little information about the extent to which adults increase their out-of-class reading as a consequence of participating in adult literacy programs. The data above would seem to suggest that if such programs do not lead to fairly large increases in out-of-class reading, then the adult learners are not likely to develop the vast bodies of knowledge and efficient information processing skills needed to achieve high levels of literacy.

Loss of Literacy Ability

Some evidence exists to suggest that adult students who leave literacy programs may not only fail to develop additional literacy skills if they do not engage in further literacy practice, but also that they may actually, and fairly rapidly, lose new found skills if they are not practiced after the program (Sticht, 1975, p. 118). In military research, U. S. Army literacy students who received job-related reading training and then went on to job technical training were retested about eight weeks after leaving the literacy program. It was found that at the end of the six week literacy program the students had gained 2.4 reading grade levels (RGL) of skill in job related reading. Eight weeks later, after completing job technical training, that gain dropped to 1.9 RGL, for a retention rate of 80 percent. However, while gain in general literacy was about 1.0 RGL at the end of the job-related literacy program, eight weeks later that gain had dropped to 4 months (or 0.4 RGL), for a retention rate of only 40 percent of what had been gained in general literacy. However, since it is likely that they did not engage in as much reading practice as during the literacy program, this may have contributed to their loss of most of their gain in general literacy.

The foregoing suggests that although the amount of reading practice may have dropped when the students left literacy training and entered job technical training, they nonetheless continued to practice reading job- related materials. This may have helped them maintain their gain in job-related literacy.