Today, the National Center for Education Statistics released a new
report, Basic Reading Skills and the Literacy of America's Least
Literate Adults: Results from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult
Literacy (NAAL).  

 

Key Findings:

*	Seven million adults, or about 3% of the adult population, could
not complete even the most basic literacy tasks in the main assessment
and were given the supplemental assessment.  
*	Nearly 1 in 5 adults in the nonliterate in English group had a
high school diploma or GED.  Among them, more than half (representing
roughly 600,000 adults) had earned their high school degree in the US.
*	For those for whom Spanish is a first language, a delay in
learning English is associated with low basic reading skills.  Those who
learned English before age 11 had basic reading scores similar to
average native English speakers (97 words read correctly per minute);
however, for those who learned English after age 21, average scores were
35 points (or about one-third) lower.   Due to the correlational nature
of these data, it is impossible to make causal attributions, i.e., to
say that a delay in learning English causes low basic reading skills.
*	Adults who took the main literary assessment were able to read,
on average, 98 words correctly per minute (wpm), in comparison to 34 wpm
by those in the supplemental assessment. 

To view the report, please visit NAAL web site at: NCES.ED.GOV/NAAL

Jaleh Behroozi Soroui

jsoroui at air.org

 

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