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How Literacy Develops
conceptual model to describe how literacy develops is shown in Figure 1.
A
It shows several key factors that affect learners’ literacy development—
the learning context, texts and tools, literacy activities, and the learner—
and it also shows the aspects of each of these factors that are possible to
influence through instruction. The following brief section discusses
several of these factors, along with research-based guidance on how to influence them
to support learning.
Goals for learning and
Text features
literacy
Tools embedded in
Instructional practices
text
Motivating features
Motivating features
Cultural and language
Skill demands
norms
The
Text and
Learning
Tools
Context
Literacy
The
Activity and
Learner
Purpose
Development
of Literate
Practice
Knowledge/skills for comprehension,
production, and use of text
What goal does this
Motivation
literacy activity achieve
Neurocognitive differences
for the student?
Education
Linguistic background
Literacy learning goals
FIGURE 1: Model of the development of literate practice
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Developing Reading and Writing
4
Literacy texts. Developing readers need to confront texts that are challenging, mean-
ingful, and engaging. Texts should allow learners to practice component literacy skills
(described below) and support them as they stretch beyond existing skills. Instruc-
tors should carefully select texts with the appropriate level of difficulty: texts that
both draw on knowledge students have already mastered and also present challenges.
Instructors also should provide prompts and other forms of support to learners as they
work their way through challenging texts.
Effective instruction uses a variety of texts because when learners acquire knowledge and
skills across multiple contexts, they are better able to retain what they learn and transfer
it to new tasks and situations. Unfortunately, there are few reading materials that are de-
signed to foster the component skills of developing readers while offering interesting and
useful content to adolescents and adults. A priority for research is to develop and evaluate
materials and texts that can support this key element of effective instruction.
Literacy tools. Being literate demands proficiency with current tools and practices that
require reading and writing—including digital and online media used to communicate
with others and to gather, evaluate, and synthesize information. It is important, there-
fore, to offer reading and writing instruction that incorporates the use of both print and
digital methods of communication. This type of instruction prepares learners to accom-
plish important reading and writing tasks that are indispensable in today’s world.
Literacy activities and purposes. Novice learners require thousands of hours of prac-
tice to develop expertise in complex domains such as reading and writing. Even those
who are not novices require substantial practice using reading and writing skills for
particular purposes. To motivate learners to persist for the long time it takes to develop
expertise, it is important for instructors to understand the component literacy skills that
learners need to meet today’s social, educational, workplace, and personal demands, and
plan instruction with activities that develop those skills.
This type of instruction, which helps learners develop component skills as they perform
practical literacy tasks, also increases the likelihood that literacy skills will be used
outside the classroom. Research on learning has shown that the likelihood of transfer-
ring a newly learned skill to a new task depends on the similarity between the new task
and the tasks used for learning. Therefore, literacy instruction is most likely to lead to
durable, transferable learning if it incorporates real-world activities, tasks, and tools.
In addition, activities that integrate reading and writing instruction contribute to the
development of both skills. Reading and writing require some of the same knowledge
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Developing Reading and Writing 5
and cognitive and linguistic processes—such as knowledge of vocabulary, spelling pat-
terns, text structures, and syntax—and so learning and insights in one area can lead to
learning and insights in the other. In fact, research has shown that reading improves
with frequent writing.
Characteristics of the learner. Adult literacy learners vary in many ways—in their
literacy development needs and goals, education levels, economic status, culture, lin-
guistic background, and social, psychological, and neurobiological characteristics. To be
effective instruction should be adapted for different groups of learners.
The varying ages of adult learners also has implications
for instruction. Although most adults who receive lit-
eracy instruction are in their 20s and 30s, along with an
increasing number of youth who have dropped out of high
school, a significant portion of learners—18 percent—are
over 40. That percentage can be expected to increase dur-
ing economic downturns and shifts that require adults to
further develop their skills to meet the literacy demands
of available jobs. Understanding this older group of learn-
ers is important because adults as young as mid-30s may
experience some age-related changes in brain processing.
Though most of the processes involved in reading and
writing appear to be largely unchanged in later adulthood,
older adults do experience declines in areas affected by visual perception and speed
of processing—changes that might need consideration when planning instruction and
practice.
Other age-related shifts may occur as well. Although word recognition appears to be
fundamentally unchanged throughout the adult lifespan, with age, readers tend to rely
more on recognizing a whole word as a unit instead of decoding it using phonics skills.
This characteristic is important because a facility with phonics is essential for reading
new words. Yet in both spoken and written communication, aging learners may increas-
ingly rely on the context to recognize individual words. Memory declines can contrib-
ute to difficulties in connecting different parts of context needed for comprehension.
Older adults might find it necessary to use such strategies as making notes and reread-
ing parts of texts, for example. On the positive side, however, the knowledge that adults
accumulate over their lifetimes can aid comprehension.
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Developing Reading and Writing
6
Literacy in a Digital Age
In today’s world, expectations for literacy include
Strong reading and writing skills underpin valued
work and daily life, such as:
and
