In these readings, Laubach followed functional context education principles and incorporated materials that were selected to be of interest to adults. This approach was developed earlier in India where Laubach had been invited by Mahatma Gandhi to help in preparing materials for teaching adults to read.

Paul A. Witty (1898-1976).

During World War II, just as in World War I, the armed services once again faced the need to utilize hundreds of thousands of men who were illiterate or poorly literate. Paul Andrew Witty, with an M.A. (1923) and Ph. D. (1931) from Columbia University in Psychology, specialized in understanding the process of learning to read and in developing methods for helping students who were having difficulties in learning to read. With this background, he was called upon to serve as an education officer in the War Department.

In May of 1943 the War Department published TM 21-500, entitled the "Army Reader". In this book, which was produced under Witty's direction, soldiers in the Army's Special Training Units for literacy instruction were introduced to Private Pete, a fictional soldier in a Special Training Unit who was also learning reading, writing, and arithmetic. The idea was that soldier's would be able to identify with Private Pete and understand what they were reading about him because they shared common experiences, such as living in the camp, sleeping in the barracks, eating in the mess hall, and so forth. These were all things that Private Pete did in the Army Reader. Witty was apparently the first to use this approach of trying to motivate adults learning to read by providing a fictional counterpart with whom they could identify.

Witty's analytic approach reflected the influence of William S. Gray, one of the founders of the famous Dick and Jane series for children, which provided a model for Witty's use of Private Pete in the Army Reader, and Arthur I. Gates, a leading reading professor at Columbia University. Both of these men were advocates of the analytic or "meaning emphasis" approach known as the "word" method. In this method students first developed readiness to read by discussing illustrations from the readers. Then they learned a basic store of sight words used in the readiness training. Then they moved on to simple sentences made up of the sight words. In this approach, phonics instruction was downplayed and postponed until the students could do quite a bit of reading based upon discussion and whole word recognition training.

Witty’s program for the Army introduced several innovations in adult literacy education, including early use of audio-visual technologies such as film strips, cartoon strips in Our War, a special newspaper for literacy students, and photo novellas in which Private Pete and his buddy Daffy were portrayed in photographs of soldiers as actors in materials used to teach reading to soldiers about to be discharged from military service. The program also innovated with unit tests to measure progress towards achieving the goal of 4th grade reading ability. In all these materials, a Functional Context Education approach was used to ensure that the materials were of direct relevance to the soldier students in the context of the military training and service in which they found themselves at the time.

Francis P. Robinson (1906-Unknown)

World War II not only served to teach reading to the poorly educated and least literate adults, it also served higher level students like those in developmental reading programs in colleges (Pauk, 1999). In what was known as the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), United States colleges were swamped by Army personnel who were on campus to take courses for hundreds of specialized skills needed to win the war. The courses these soldiers had to take were accelerated, highly concentrated, and placed considerable demands on reading and mastering the content of difficult technical manuals. Under such conditions, many men were experiencing reading and learning difficulties.