The following article may be of interest in the discussion of teaching
phonics with adults. The Auding and Reading book referenced in the article
is available free online at:
http://www.nald.ca/fulltext/sticht/aar/cover.htm<http://www.nald.ca/fulltext/sticht/aar/cover.htm>

Tom Sticht


www.literacytrust.org/database/primary//phonicsSticht.html


Synthetic phonics and the shift from oracy to literacy - lessons from adult
literacy research - an article by Tom Sticht (October, 2005)

Recent calls for additional emphases upon synthetic phonics in the United
Kingdom caused me to ask, "Suppose that you could wave your hands in front
of the eyes of children entering the primary schools and make it possible
for them to instantly know phonics and to be able to decode any text. Would
all children then be equally literate?" Research on adult literacy
development suggests not.

Several years ago the US Partnership for Reading published a report authored
by John Kruidenier entitled Research-Based Principles for Adult Basic
Education Reading Instruction. The report laments the paucity of research
on adult reading and discusses how it draws upon K-12 [Kindergarten to
Grade 12] research to inform adult reading instruction when that is
appropriate. Missing in most of the recent guidance on scientific,
evidence-based research for teaching children to read is any reference to
adult literacy research that can inform K-12 educational practice.

However, the Spring 2003 issue of the American Educator, the professional
journal of the American Federation of Teachers, an AFL-CIO labour
organisation for educators, published a special issue with the title: "The
Fourth-Grade Plunge: The Cause, the Cure". The cover of the special
includes a summary that states:

"In fourth grade, poor children's reading comprehension starts a drastic
decline-and rarely recovers. The Cause: They hear millions fewer words at
home than do their advantaged peers - and since words represent knowledge,
they don't gain the knowledge that underpins reading comprehension. The
Cure: Immerse these children, and the many others whose comprehension is
low, in words and the knowledge the words represent- as early as possible."
Inside the journal, the major article is by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., author of the
bestselling, and controversial book Cultural Knowledge: What Every American
Needs to Know (Houghton Mifflin, 1987). In the present article, Hirsch
offers one approach to building children's comprehension ability in a
section called, Build Oral Comprehension and Background Knowledge. The
section begins with the statement, "Thomas Sticht has shown that oral
comprehension typically places an upper limit on reading comprehension; if
you don't recognise and understand the word when you hear it, you also
won't be able to comprehend it when reading. This tells us something very
important: oral comprehension generally needs to be developed in our
youngest readers if we want them to be good readers."

Hirsch cites a book entitled Auding and Reading: A Developmental Model by
Sticht, et al (HumRRO, 1974) in support of his statement. In an earlier
book entitled The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them (Doubleday,
1996) Hirsch has referred to the limits of oral language comprehension on
reading comprehension once decoding has been acquired as "Sticht`s Law."

Later in this special issue of the American Educator, Andrew Biemiller, a
professor at the Institute of Child Study at the University of Toronto
extends Hirsch's point in an article entitled, Oral Comprehension Sets the
Ceiling on Reading Comprehension. In support of his argument Biemiller
cites a chapter by Sticht & James (1984) which includes an extended
discussion of the concepts of "oracy to literacy transfer" and the use of
listening assessment to determine "reading potential."

What I have found particularly interesting is that these articles cite
research by colleagues and myself that was done as part of a programme of
research to better understand adult reading education, not childhood
reading. Almost 30 years ago, to aid in the better understanding of adult
literacy issues, colleagues and I wrote Auding and Reading: A Developmental
Model to provide a summary and synthesis of how the "typical child," a
theoretical abstraction of course, born into our literate society grows up
to become literate in the judgment of other adults. This was done to
provide a frame of reference for better understanding how it is that some
children, unlike the "typical child," grow up to be less than adequately
literate in the judgment of other adults and might benefit from
participating in an adult literacy programme.

The Auding and Reading book offered guidance for adult reading instruction
that presaged the present guidance in the American Educator for K-12
education. For instance, on page 122 of Auding and Reading we stated the
need for: "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 recognise 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 in teaching vocabulary and concepts to unskilled readers."

The Auding and Reading book goes on to discuss concepts of automaticity in
decoding, which underlies fluency of decoding in both auding and reading
and why it is important to develop fluency (automaticity) of decoding for
the constructive processes involved in comprehension by languaging to
proceed either by listening to the spoken language or by reading the
written language.

It is indicative of the rather long time that it takes for ideas to be
disseminated and assimilated in a field of knowledge that this year the
American Educator, which reaches a million or so educators, has brought
many of the ideas from adult literacy research into the arena of K-12
education.

There remains a need for further understanding of the life span changes that
affect reading. For instance, the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS)
indicated that as adults got older, their performance of IALS literacy tasks
dropped. In research on the use of the telephone to assess literacy,
colleagues and I found that we could draw upon the theoretical foundation
of literacy given in the Auding and Reading book and subsequent research on
listening and reading to assess knowledge development across the life span.

In this case, we found that older adults knew more than younger adults about
a wide range of subjects. We used techniques that did not overload working
memory like most of the National
Assment of Adult Literacy  tasks do. Because older adults generally lose
some working memory capacity, we felt that NAAL type tasks are
inappropriate for assessing the literacy ability of older adults. Whatever
the case, the fact that adults change across the life span argues for more
research to better understand literacy development in adulthood beyond what
we have learned today and what we can gleam from studying the literacy
development of children. Interestingly, as the foregoing illustrates, what
new learning we acquire about adult literacy development across the life
span may have additional, important implications for K-12 literacy
education. This adds weight to the importance of policies that emphasise
the need for research on adult literacy education.

Thomas G. Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education
(Basic Skills Agency website, October 2005)


Sticht, Thomas G., Beck, Lawrence J., Hauke, Robert N., Kleiman, Glenn
  M., & James, James H.(1974). Auding and Reading. Retrieved May 05, 2006,
  from
http://www.nald.ca/fulltext/sticht/aar/cover.htm<http://www.nald.ca/fulltext/sticht/aar/cover.htm>

  Auding and Reading: A Developmental Model

Note: the word "auding" stands for "listening comprehension" and was coined
in the 1950s by a blind graduate student to serve as a parallel word to
"reading".

  Contents

  I. Introduction
  Language and Learning
  Previous Reviews on These Topics
  A Call for Theory
  And Yet Another Literature Review
  Overview of the Report

  II. The Developmental Model of Auding and Reading

  III. The Languaging Process
  The Nature of the Conceptual Base
  The Acquisition of the Conceptual Base
  The Acquisition of Languaging Ability
  The Phonological System
  Semantics: Individual Words as Holophrases
  Semantics: Meanings of Individual Words
  Acquisition of Syntactic Knowledge

  IV. The Development of Listening/Looking and Auding/Reading Processes
  Hearing and Seeing: The Continuity of Organismic and Environmental
  Information
  The Memory System
  The Development of Looking and Listening as Attentive Processes
  Auding as Listening
  Auding as Languaging
  Auding as a Tracking Task
  Reading as Looking
  Reading as Languaging
  Auding and Reading Compared

  V. A Review of Literature Related to Four Hypotheses Derived From the
Model
  Hypothesis 1
  Hypothesis 2
  Hypothesis 3
  Hypothesis 4

  VI. Summary and Implications
  Review of the Hypotheses
  Some Accomplishments and Limitations of the Modeling Effort
  Implications