IMPLICATIONS

1. This review has indicated that reading ability is built upon a foundation of language abilities developed and expressed largely by means of the oracy skills of auding and speaking. For this reason, a much greater emphasis than has been shown in the past should be given to the development of:
   1. Methods for characterizing and assessing oral language as a developing ability and in relation to reading skills development. For instance, as mentioned earlier (p. 70) an auding-reading test battery which could index the discrepancies between these skills would be useful in revealing the extent to which reading problems reflect difficulties in handling language in printed form or low levels of language in general. Only a very few of these instruments exist today (for children, not adults), and they do not reflect careful analysis of auding and reading processes. Nor do they take account of new technologies for presenting audio displays (e.g., inexpensive playback magnetic tape machines; time compression/expansion equipment for accelerating or decelerating speech rate; methods of indexing audio tapes) to permit students to preview, review, and control the rate of presentation of the audio message. Such techniques tend to equate the spoken and printed displays in terms of their referability (how easy it is to refer to, jump ahead, look backward, etc.) and may permit the development of improved auding-reading test batteries.
   2. Methods for improving oral language skills as foundation skills for reading. In this regard, it would seem that, at least with beginning or unskilled readers, a sequence of instruction in which vocabulary and concepts are first introduced and learned via oracy skills would reduce the learning burden by not requiring the learning of both vocabulary and decoding skills at the same time. It is difficult to see how a person can learn to recognize printed words by "sounding them out" through some decoding scheme if, in fact, the words are not in the oral language of the learner. Thus, an oracy-to- literacy sequence of training would seem desirable ill teaching new vocabulary and concepts to unskilled readers.
2. As presented in the present model, both the oracy and the literacy language skills function to transmit and comprehend conceptualizations formed from knowledge stored in memory. It is necessary therefore that an auder or reader have an adequate, relevant knowledge base if comprehension of the spoken or printed message is to occur. This suggests that:
   1. There is a need for research to determine how "old" knowledge is used to acquire "new" knowledge by oracy and literacy skills. In order to learn new knowledge, an auder or reader must utilize some strategy for relating what he already knows to what is to be learned. Verbal learning studies have found, for instance, that subjects learning S-R lists of words make up mnemonic organizers, such as making a sentence of the S-R word pairs, to recall the lists. In other words they incorporate the new information (S-R pairs) into old information (a syntactical pattern). We need research to develop methods by which a person can take stock of what he already knows and manipulate this knowledge to 1) create new knowledge or 2) learn a new body of knowledge. Such research should also deal with methods for representing knowledge, and for assessing a person's knowledge vis-a-vis a to-be-Learned body of knowledge.
   2. There is a need for research and development to ensure that students acquire the requisite knowledge base needed to perform significant adult literacy tasks. The concepts of general literacy and general educational development have long predominated in the educational institution. However, study of the K-12 curriculum, and especially the 9-12 curriculum indicates that, rather than developing general literacy skills, what are actually being developed are school- related literacy skills. Thus, the traditional "college-prep" program provides a body of knowledge relevant to the literacy and oracy tasks that will be encountered in college. The high school English program stresses the literary arts, poetry, interpretive writing, and so forth. It is possible, however, that such "general education" or "general literacy" training may not be too general. Many high school graduates of average intelligence find themselves unprepared for work- unprepared for performing many life management tasks requiring oracy and literacy skills. Thus, as far as knowledge is concerned, literacy may indeed be quite specific. To be able to read and follow complex directions for assembling/disassembling equipment, training in interpreting Milton may not suffice.

      We need, then, to consider what is general in "general literacy" (perhaps the decoding skills in reading) and what specific knowledges are required for various literacy tasks. This may be even more important in the case of adult basic education where training programs may be limited in duration, and immediate "payoff" for learning to read is expected (e.g.,job entry or promotion). In these cases it seems unlikely that general educational development (GED) involving reading in such subjects as social studies, history, life sciences, or English literature will offer much transfer to non-academic literacy tasks. We need to ensure that the relevant knowledge bases for accomplishing such tasks are identified and developed by students.