The National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS), which was funded by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) as part of its overall assessment program in adult literacy, was the largest and most comprehensive study of adult literacy ever conducted in the United States (Kirsch, Jungeblut, Jenkins and Kolstad, 1993). Like all large-scale assessments funded by NCES, NALS was guided by a committee, which was comprised of a group of nationally recognized scholars, practitioners, and administrators who adopted the following definition of literacy:
“Literacy is using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.”
This definition captures the initial work of the committee guiding the development of the assessment and provides the basis for creating other aspects of the framework to be discussed. It was also reviewed and adopted by the countries participating in the first round of IALS and was carried forward in IALSS. This definition includes several assumptions made by panel members and, thus, it is important to consider various parts of this definition in turn.
Beginning with “Literacy is…”
, the
term literacy is used in preference to “reading” because it is likely to convey more precisely
to a non-expert audience what
the survey is measuring. “Reading” is often
understood as simply decoding, or reading
aloud, whereas the intention of the adult surveys is
to measure something broader
and deeper. Researchers studying literacy within particular
contexts noted that
different cultures and groups may value different kinds
of literacy practices (Sticht,
1975; Heath, 1980; Szwed, 1981). Heath, for example,
found that uses for reading could be described in terms of instrumental, social interactional,
news-related, memory
supportive, substitutes for oral messages, provision
of a permanent record, and personal
confirmation. The fact that people read different materials
for different purposes
implies a range of proficiencies that may not be well
captured by signing one’s name,
completing a certain number of years of schooling, or
scoring at an 8th-grade level
on a test of academic reading comprehension.
The phrase “… using printed and written information”
draws
attention to the
fact that panel members view literacy not as a set of
isolated skills associated with
reading and writing, but more importantly as the application
of those skills for specific
purposes in specific contexts. When literacy is studied
within varying contexts,
diversity becomes its hallmark. First, people engage
in literacy behaviours for a variety
of uses or purposes (Sticht, 1978; Heath, 1980; Cook-Gumperz
and Gumperz, 1981;
Mikulecky, 1982). These uses vary across contexts (Heath,
1980; Venezky, 1983)
and among people within the same context (Kirsch and
Guthrie, 1984a). This
variation in use leads to an interaction with a broad
range of materials that have
qualitatively different linguistic forms (Diehl, 1980;
Jacob, 1982; Miller, 1982). In
some cases, these different types of literacy tasks have
been associated with different
cognitive strategies or reading behaviours (Sticht, 1978,
1982; Crandall, 1981; Scribner
and Cole, 1981; Kirsch and Guthrie, 1984b).
The phrase “… to function in society, to
achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s
knowledge and potential ”
is meant to capture the
full scope of situations in which
literacy plays a role in the lives of adults, from private
to public, from school to work,
to lifelong learning and active citizenship. “To
achieve one’s goals and to develop
one’s knowledge and potential” points to
the view that literacy enables the fulfillment
of individual aspirations—those that are defined
such as graduation or obtaining a
job, and those less defined and less immediate which
extend and enrich one’s personal
life. The phrase “to function in society”
is
meant to acknowledge that literacy provides
individuals with a means of contributing to as well as
benefiting from society. Literacy
skills are generally recognized as important for nations
to maintain or improve their
standard of living and to compete in an increasingly
global market place. Yet, they
are equally as important for individual participation
in technologically advancing
societies with their formal institutions, complex legal
systems, and large government
programs.