In Zoom class, Larissa Phillips drilled her student, who is in his sixties, on the digraph “ck.” In previous lessons, they’d already gone through several common digraphs—two-letter combinations that form one sound—like “sh,” “th,” and “ch.”
After explaining the concept, Phillips instructed the student to rehearse decoding different sounds for vowels and consonants before blending sounds, reviewing words, and then finally reading phrases. By the end, the student was reading complete sentences that used “ck” multiple times with ease like “I was too sick to check in at my job.”
“I’m hungry for this,” the student said, who declined to give his name out of privacy concerns.
The student said that he’d been trying to improve his reading since dropping out of school in the ninth grade. However, he said the New York City tutoring program offered through his union was catered around GED preparation, not the foundational reading skills that this student sought. It wasn’t until he found Phillips and her program, the Volunteer Literacy Project, that he started getting the reading help he needed.
This older gentleman is not alone in needing help improving basic reading skills. According to the most recent study by the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies in 2018, 17.6% of American adults struggle to read.
Amy Pickard, an assistant professor of adult literacy education at Indiana University Bloomington, said the one in five Americans who struggle with reading “have pretty serious difficulties using print literacy in their daily lives” and “as a means of communication.”
Phillips’ student wasn’t alone in his struggle to find adequate help with basic reading. Most federally funded adult education classes focus on workforce development, not basic literacy, according to Alisa Belzer, a professor of adult education at Rutgers University.
The federally funded programs under the Adult Education and Family Literacy Act (AEFLA) provide “educational opportunities for adults who lack basic literacy, numeracy skills, or proficiency in English,” according to a U.S. Department of Education spokesperson. Serving more than 1 million adults, the programs “support basic skill development such as reading, writing, mathematics, and English language acquisition” in addition to providing “workforce preparation activities as well as opportunities for adults to acquire high school equivalency preparation and transition services to postsecondary education or training programs,” according to the spokesperson.
Pickard said that since the federal government established a federal reading program for adults about 60 years ago, the federal program shifted to prioritize workforce preparation instead of teaching basic reading skills. An investigation by ProPublica found that the federal adult education system is limited, increasingly insufficient, and dependent on local politics.
However, Belzer said only some of the adults who participated in these programs had the lowest reading skills.
Pickard said that there is a “large, robust” nonprofit system in the adult education world, including programs like the Volunteer Literacy Project, which handle most of the adults with the lowest reading levels who seek help.
“Very often, federally funded programs who don’t want to or feel they can’t address literacy issues for adults will not accept adults who have reading difficulties into their programs, into these publicly funded programs, and refer them to these nonprofit programs that don’t receive federal adult education funding,” Pickard said.
A U.S. Department of Education spokesperson said, “Programs that receive funding through AEFLA follow eligibility requirements outlined in the act,” and that eligible individuals are 16 years or older, not enrolled or required to be enrolled in secondary school under state law, and lack “basic skills,” a high school diploma or equivalent, or are learning English.
As the science of reading movement sweeps the nation and forces elementary schools to realign literacy instruction with a body of research that concludes that students need explicit instruction in specific aspects of reading like phonics—the relationship between letters and sounds—at least 223 bills enacted in 45 states and the District of Columbia are aimed at reforming literacy instruction, according to the Albert Shanker Institute. However, almost all of the legislation is aimed at K-12 education, particularly grades K-3. Some say the adult literacy world needs to catch up.
Belzer said that, like elementary students learning early literacy, adults with low literacy skills need “systematic phonics instruction.” However, in addition to a lack of programs designed to teach basic literacy skills, Belzer said the adult education world doesn’t have many teachers who are trained to teach reading with evidence-based practices.
Pickard said that most of the research supporting the science of reading movement is focused on how children develop reading skills, not on adults.
“The truth is, we don’t really know what would work really well for adult literacy learners,” Pickard said.
Still, she thinks adult literacy educators can and should use the science of reading as a model for their own reading lessons. “I think you kind of have to work with evidence that’s available, and go from there,” Pickard said.
“It’s clear that we need reading reparations for grown-ups as much as we need reading reform in our elementary schools,” Sarah Carr wrote in The Christian Science Monitor, adding that BIPOC adults are disproportionately impacted by the lack of adult programs in line with the science, since “they are more likely to receive an inadequate K-12 education.”
Through the Volunteer Literacy Project, Phillips is trying to fill some of the gaps.
Phillips first got involved in adult education by working at a GED preparation program where she says she kept getting students who lacked basic reading skills and then “discovered that nobody knew how to help them.” Pickard said the lack of training among educators of adults is prevalent.
“Having myself been an adult literacy educator and having worked with many adult literacy educators, a lot of people don’t know how to teach reading,” Pickard said. “I didn’t know how to teach reading. I would do things that I thought were fun and interesting and would engage my students and we would read. But there was a lot of time frustration, at least on my part, about not really having a plan and just kind of winging it.”
“It’s really devastating to think about,” Phillips said of the lack of teachers for adults trained to teach reading. “After six months, you [adult reading students] realize it’s not working, and you quit because you’re taking all this time and effort to leave your family or your job or whatever to get to tutoring, and you’re offered something that’s completely ineffective.”
So, Phillips created her own curriculum for the Volunteer Literacy Project, which uses a “structured phonics approach.” The tutoring is open to a limited number of adults in New York state, free of charge. Phillips also provides training to adult educators who want to start their own program elsewhere.
“We really push the decoding, the sound-symbol relationship,” Phillips said. Decoding is the act of making the connections between the letters on the page and the sounds they represent.
Phillips said one of the biggest challenges she experiences while trying to teach adults how to decode is that they’ve developed long-established coping mechanisms, having navigated the world of the written word for years. These are hard habits to break.
“Even if they can’t read at all or almost at all, they have so many words memorized, and they have so many strategies that it’s really difficult to get them onto the path of decoding, of connecting the sound and the symbol,” Phillips said.
Additionally, Phillips said there is a severe shortage of age-appropriate materials and resources for adult students to use to practice reading.
“We have to have them read children’s books,” Phillips said. “I think it might feel humiliating. … How do you get to be a fluent reader of adult texts if you don’t go through these child and then adolescent-level texts, which not only build your fluency but build your vocabulary? … Every single one of them is made to feel like they’re an outlier, when they’re not outliers, they’re part of a phenomenon,” Phillips said of the adults lacking age-appropriate learning materials.
Phillips wrote her own short story collection for adults at beginner reading levels called City Stories. She says the stories are “all about adults and adult issues like jobs and relationships and immigration.” Stories increase in difficulty as the series progresses further.
Phillips says she has been told that it’s impossible to teach adults who read below the fourth-grade level how to read. But she disagrees.
“It may be true that many adults who read below the fourth-grade level will not attain the kind of high school or college reading ability. However, their lives change very quickly because they can read. Every little bit that you can read is helpful,” Phillips said.
Her student, who has been attending her classes for about two years, says his reading improved, thanks to the explicit instruction.
“Who thought I could sound a letter out? Who thought I could do that? I can do it now,” he said. “Before, I couldn’t read the Bible. Now I can read the Bible.”
