To help students learn to precisely analyze sentences of the passages, a simple grammar was taught that emphasized that all sentences consist of a "main idea" and "more about the main idea." More about who, what, when, where, why, how and more about the subject of the sentence. Exercises using sentences from the passages were developed to help students "parse" the sentences using the simple grammar. Finally, for some students with very poorly developed word recognition skills, individual vocabulary exercises were developed that included drill on recognizing the written versions of words that were either already in the student's speaking vocabulary, or which were taught by the instructor and then practiced by the student in reading aloud activities.

In practice, students worked in the opposite sequence from that discussed above. That is, first work was given at the word recognition level, then at the sentence parsing level, and finally in "parsing" the entire passage into pictures, matrices, or flow charts. Not all students required extensive work at the first two levels, and so they moved quickly to the passage analysis tasks.

In addition to the job-linked material, the FLIT schoolhouse had available a small library of paperback books, newspapers, and general adult basic education materials that students could read on breaks during the six hour training day.

Evaluation of the FLIT program. Research indicated that the general literacy programs had been making about 7 months improvement in general reading and about 5 months gain on the job related-reading tests we constructed. In contrast, the job-related programs made as much or more gain in general reading and four to five times the gain in job-related reading.

In a separate, independent, evaluation sponsored by the U. S. Department of Education, the American Institutes for Research evaluated the FLIT program and declared it one of only 12 programs out of 1500 candidates from both K-12 and adult education to be an exemplary program.

Later our team implemented the new curriculum at all Army training posts using local teachers and replicated the original program findings across the nation, demonstrating that our R & D team teachers were not a critical component contributing to the program’s outcomes.

Retention of literacy skills. To examine the retention of end-of-course reading gains in both general and job-linked literacy, 97 students were followed-up eight weeks later and retested. On the general reading test, the students had left the six week FLIT program with a gain of l0 months from pre- to post-testing. Eight weeks later only 40 percent (4 months) of this gain was retained. In job-linked reading, students had left the FLIT program with 24 months gain and some eight weeks later they retained some 80 percent (19 months) of this gain. Thus, not only was job-linked literacy training more effective in increasing job reading skill, the newly developed skill was also retained better as the students applied what they had learned in the literacy program to their job technical skills training.

Some significant aspects of the FLIT work for the scientific, evidence-based emphasis that is now facing the adult literacy education field are that (1) we took the context into account in determining how to teach reading, (2) we used a treatment/comparison group method in developing our experimental curriculum, (3) we developed assessment instruments that measured whether students were learning what we were teaching, that is, the job-related reading task tests, (4) we used the same general literacy tests that the adult educators were using to measure generalization beyond job-related literacy in the form of gains in general literacy, (5) there was an external, independent evaluation of the program, and (6) we replicated the program five times in other locations in the U. S. using different teachers to demonstrate that it was the curriculum and not the R & D team that made the improvements in job-related reading occur.