Thank you very much for the literacy information. The information was
very heart-warming and will be put to good use. I know my students both
GED and college prep will also enjoy reading it. I am planning to use
graphic organizers, critical thinking questions, grammar activities, and
sentence structure activities. 

-----Original Message-----
From: professionaldevelopment-bounces at nifl.gov
[mailto:professionaldevelopment-bounces at nifl.gov] On Behalf Of
tsticht at znet.com
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2008 1:29 PM
To: professionaldevelopment at nifl.gov; familyliteracy at nifl.gov
Subject: [ProfessionalDevelopment 2659] Literacy From Battalions to
Books

November 14, 2008


>From Battalions to Book Publishers: Bridges in Teaching Reading With

Adults,
Adolescents, and Children

Tom Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education

At times in the United States it has been necessary for the military
services to recruit, train, and utilize personnel whose literacy and/or
English language skills were low. In these times the military has
implemented literacy programs for illiterate or non-English speaking
recruits. Later, some of those who worked on literacy programs in the
military have gone on to apply methods used in the military programs to
the
literacy education of adults, adolescents, and children in the civilian
world. Three of these bridges from military to civilian literacy
education
are summarized below to illustrate some salient principles in teaching
reading across the age span.

World War I

In World War I some 700,000 recruits were determined to be illiterate,
many
of whom were non-English speakers. To prepare these recruits for regular
military duties they were sent to Recruit Education Centers (REC) around
the country. At Camp Upton, New York, the REC taught illiterate and
non-English speaking recruits following a course of instruction
developed
by Captain Garry C. Myers and instructors in the REC. With a Ph.D in
Psychology from Columbia University, Myers was concerned that the
military
teaching of adults should "stimulate sentiment in favor of better
educational opportunities for coming generations." This was an early
interest in the intergenerational transfer of literacy that today
underpins
many family literacy programs.

The course of instruction at Camp Upton was divided into six levels from
low
to high, and for each level special materials were prepared using
illustrations, cartoons, caricatures, and stories. The goal was to make
materials with a diversity of activities to meet the various interests
of
the recruits.

Long after World War I, in 1946, Myers and his wife Caroline, the first
woman hired to teach illiterate adults in the Army in World War I,
started
a magazine for children called Highlights for Children. The motto of the
magazine was "Fun with a purpose", which is still used on the magazine.
As
with the World War I materials, the magazine uses lots of illustrations,
puzzles, cartoons and stories aimed at catching the interest of both
children and their parents. The latter are encouraged to read to their
children in keeping with the earlier idea of the intergenerational
transfer
of literacy from parents to their progeny. Today, with a circulation of
some
2 million, Highlights for Children shows a continuity of teaching of
children with those ideas and methods used by Myers in teaching literacy
with adults in World War I.

World War II

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 poorly
literate. Like Myers, Paul Witty had a Ph.D from Columbia University in
Psychology. He 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.

Witty's work before his Army job emphasized the importance of meeting
children's interests when teaching reading. This emphasis was brought
into
his work in the Army when, in May of 1943, the War Department published
the
"Army Reader". In this book, produced under Witty's direction, soldiers
in
the Army's literacy programs were introduced to Private Pete, a
fictional
soldier who was also learning reading, writing, and arithmetic. The idea
was that soldiers would identify with Private Pete and be interested in
what they were reading because they shared common experiences, such as 
sleeping in the barracks, eating in the mess hall, and so forth. He used
this novel approach along with the use of various media, film strips,
comic
strips, photo novels, and other innovations.

After the war, Witty focused on teaching reading to children from
primary
through secondary school. As with the Army program, he stressed the
importance of meeting children's interests in teaching reading and  the
use
of a variety of media, radio programs, comics, newspapers, and books to
find
and present materials that matched these interests. He wrote two reading
series for children.  He also served as an associate editor of the
Myers'
Highlights for Children magazine discussed above and the children's
newspaper, My Weekly Reader. Today, the International Reading
Association,
which Witty helped found, offers the Paul A. Witty short story award for
writers of children's literature. This reflects his enduring concern
that
teaching reading, whether with adults, adolescents, or young children,
should be built on matching the interests of these groups.

The Vietnam War

During and after the Vietnam war, the writer directed the development of
the
Army's Functional Literacy (FLIT) program for marginally literate
personnel.
This was the first program that introduced systematic methods for
studying
literacy practices of personnel in various jobs and job training
programs,
incorporated these practices into the design of job-related literacy
programs, and compared the effectiveness of general literacy programs to
job-related programs. It was found that the latter produced as much
improvement in general literacy as did the Army's general literacy
programs
but three to five times the improvements in job-related literacy, which
was
what the programs were supposed to do.

Later, the U. S. Navy and Air Force developed adult literacy programs
following the job-related, functional context approach developed in the
FLIT project . In 1987 colleagues and I published Cast-off Youth: Policy
and Training Methods From the Military Experience (Praeger, 1987) which
articulated the principles for Functional Context used in the FLIT
program.
These principles were used in the U. S. Department of Education's
National
Workplace Literacy Program.  FCE principles were used by Wider
Opportunities for Women (WOW) in their work with welfare mothers
integrating literacy and vocational education. WOW demonstrated that the
education of mothers could produce an intergenerational transfer of
literacy and motivation for learning from parents to their children.

In the early 1990s, I co-authored for the McGraw-Hill publishing company
a
15 volume set of materials following FCE principles. These books
integrated
(embedded, contextualized) occupational, literacy, and numeracy
education in
five career fields for use with adolescents in secondary schools and
adults
in post-secondary education.

Three Bridges From Military to Civilian Literacy Programs

As indicated, ideas and innovations produced by adult literacy educators
for
military personnel have found their way into the literacy education of
children, adolescents, and adults in civilian literacy programs. Three
of
these ideas are: First, program developers should take stock of the
functional contexts of the learners, under what circumstances they live,
etc. and draw upon this context in developing materials and methods.
Second, programs should focus on meeting the interests of students and
use
a  variety of media, methods, and materials to meet these interests.
Third,
 educators should be aware of the intergenerational transfer of literacy
and
motivation for learning and strive to promote an understanding of this
transfer with their adolescent and adult students who are or are likely
to
become parents.

Thomas G. Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Literacy
2062 Valley View Blvd.
El Cajon, CA 92019-2059
Tel/fax: (619) 444-9133
Email: tsticht at aznet.net





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