The International Adult Literacy Survey was the first comparative assessment of adult literacy skills ever undertaken internationally. Over 75,000 adults from 22 countries were interviewed and tested in their homes in 15 languages between 1994 and 1998. The purpose of the study was to improve understanding of the nature and magnitude of the literacy issues faced by nations and to investigate the factors that influence the development of adult literacy skills in various settings—at home, at work and across countries.
In 1994, nine countries—Canada (English and French-speaking populations), France,1 Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland (German and Frenchspeaking regions) and the United States—fielded the world's first large-scale, comparative assessment of adult literacy. Data for seven of these countries were published in December 1995. Five additional countries or territories—Australia, the Flemish community in Belgium, Great Britain, New Zealand and Northern Ireland—administered the IALS instruments in 1996 and published results in November 1997. Finally, nine other countries or regions— Chile, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia and the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland—participated in a new wave of collection in 1998. Results for these latter countries became first available in June 2000; findings for most of them are included in this monograph.
In IALS proficiency levels along a continuum denote how well adults use information to function in society. Thus, literacy is defined as the ability to understand and employ printed information in daily activities, at home, at work and in the community—to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential. In denoting a broad set of informationprocessing competencies, this conceptual approach points to the multiplicity of skills that constitute literacy in advanced industrialized countries.
The conceptual framework and the definitions of the literacy domains used for the assessment built on the seminal work of Irwin Kirsch and Peter Mosenthal (see Annex C). In particular, the IALS assessment was based on the theoretical and methodological insights offered by four large-scale North-American surveys: The Functional Reading Study conducted in the U.S. by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) in the early 1970s; the Young Adult Literacy Survey fielded in the U.S. by ETS in 1985; the Survey of Literacy Skills Used in Daily Activities undertaken by Statistics Canada in 1989; and the National Adult Literacy Survey conducted in the United States by ETS between 1989 and 1992.2
1. France withdrew its data in November 1995, after the comparative results had become available, citing concerns about comparability. The French results are therefore not included in this monograph. A new data collection was undertaken in France in 1998 as part of a European Union financed research study that applied the same methods and the same test instruments as were used in the original IALS. The results of this study are reported in Carey (2000), see Annex C.
2. See Kirsch, I.S., Jungeblut, A., and Mosenthal, P.B. (1998), "The measurement of adult literacy", pp. 105-134 in Murray, T.S., Kirsch, I.S., and Jenkins, L.B. (Eds.), Adult literacy in OECD countries: Technical report on the first international adult literacy survey, United States Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Washington, DC.