Tom 

Thanks for the paper 

There are two points I think I need to discuss ...

I am not interested per say in increasing "decoding skills" of adult readers
through technology ... I am interested in increasing knowledge and skills
... through the use of technology  .. In fact I would have no interest per
say in "TABEING" people involved in the potential pilots, it would only
clowd the issue and link it to the old paradigms  ... because we would not
be trying to affect their "reading scores" ... we are trying to get them in
a position where ... regardless of their reading scores ... they can gain
and use knowledge and information ... So I could see many learners not
really "increasing their literacy or their decoding skills" by traditional
standard measurement scores but become far more functional and successful
.... 

So ... the points raised in the paper that the "listening skills" maybe
worse then the reading skills ... is very interesting and should be
evaluated in any pilot ... 

However at a given point does not prove much in what I am talking about ...
because it is not clear at all that the person being tested were trained or
supported in development of those listening skills ... nor given the means
to prepare to use those skills ... and re-enforced in the use of the skills
as legitimate .... for any period of time 

And since most of the persons if not all of the persons tested had been
given years of efforts in reading ... and have looked upon reading as the
only way to learn ... The question is ... will the person acquire knowledge
faster and more comprehensively with "technological" approaches rather then
"reading" approaches, if given the training and support to go in that
direction ...  

And while we many of us may not agree on many points ... one thing we all
tend to agree upon is that repetition can increase knowledge acquisition ...
and with the use of technology ... and mainly based on "hearing" ... the
consumer is freer to have that repletion on knowledge issues ... free from a
class room ... free to meet their own time frames ... and schedules ... and
with far less likelihood of incorporation of "mistakes" ... (and another
thing we can agree upon is that it is harder to re-teach something that has
been learned incorrectly then to teach it correctly in the first place) ...
And when students ... try to read on their own independently at home or what
ever .. they will most likely make mistakes that can become incorporated
into their reading and make it harder to undo ...

Also we can agree that exposure to language and the use of the language
increases the likelihood that the language will be used and incorporated
into use .. and that the use of the technology in the fashion I am
presenting will greatly increase the exposure to language than under current
means .... 

And the focus on "teaching to the test" i.e. the GED in a timely fashion
... will greatly increase the reason for commitment of the student to use
the tools in a greater fashion ... 

So ... to judge how some learners handle "hearing" without training and
support is not a far comparison ... and from how I read it a major flaw in
the study --- perhaps I am reading it wrong .... is not a fair test and is
not grounded in what I am proposing

We need to see how adult learners handle learning through reading after and
several months of use of the concepts ... 

As I stated it would take time and training to help people get up to speed
and to trust what they are getting ... and only after that time frame of
support and training can we better judge how it works ... thus the need for
the pilots ... 

OK .. thanks 


Glenn Young
CSLD
530 Auburn Ave
Buffalo NY 14222
Cell 703-864-3755
Phone/Fax 716-882-2842
website: glennyoungcsld.com

-----Original Message-----
From: learningdisabilities-bounces at nifl.gov
[mailto:learningdisabilities-bounces at nifl.gov] On Behalf Of tsticht at znet.com
Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2008 12:15 PM
To: learningdisabilities at nifl.gov
Subject: [LearningDisabilities 1832] Re: technology is the answer

Re: technology is the answer

Glenn's proposal for the use of print-to-speech decoding technology to
reform adult literacy education has some merit for adults with very poorly
developed decoding skills. But there is also the question of vocabulary and
comprehension. As the following research note indicates, many adults with
poorly developed reading abilities also lack well developed listening
abilities. For these adults, technology would also have to improve word
knowledge and comprehension of materials being decoded for listening. I
have looked for but not found much research on the listening skills of
adults in adult basic education programs. If anyone has references to this
kind of research I would appreciate learning about them.
Tom Sticht


Research Note                 2 February 2002
Tom Sticht

The "Scientific" Understanding of Reading and the "Reading Potential" of
Adults  Assessed by Measuring Listening and Reading Abilities

The "scientific" work on reading that the National Reading Panel reported
takes its primary focus from the idea that, developmentally,  children
typically acquire considerable competence in listening and comprehending
speech before they develop competence in reading and comprehending the
written language. Indeed, the whole idea behind the teaching of "phonemic
awareness,"  "phonics" and other "word attack" techniques is that the
learner's main task is to learn how to "decode" the written language to
reconstruct the spoken language which can then be comprehended as usual.
This is the idea of reading as a second signaling system for listening to
and comprehending the oral language (for more on aspects of reading that
are not second signaling systems for listening see the paper Teaching
Reading With Adults under Full Text documents at www.nald.ca  searched by
my last name).

The idea that listening competence develops first and that then reading
competence permits the learner to understand in writing that which could
earlier be understood only in the spoken language leads to the concept of
"reading potential." For children, the general notion is that they enter
school at the first grade with two types of receptive communication
abilities: listening and reading (there are, of course, other communication
abilities, but they are not the object of discussion here). Typically,
children can comprehend better by listening than by reading in the primary
grades. Hypothetically for instance, a child in the first grade may
comprehend stories by listening as well as the average third grader can
comprehend the same stories by reading. Thus, the average first graders
listening score can be said to indicate a "reading potential" of the third
grade level, because if the average first grade child could instantly
comprehend by reading as well as he or  she can by listening, they would
have a reading ability comparable to a typical third graders reading
ability.

The concept of "reading potential" is important for adult literacy educators
for at least two reasons. First, whether people are designated as "learning
disabled" or not is frequently  based on the idea that on some measure,
such as an "intelligence" test, the people are at their appropriate age
level or above, but on a reading measure they are one, two or more years
behind. In other words, they are not reading "up to their potential."
Listening tests are one way of assessing people's "reading potential." In
fact, most individually administered intelligence or verbal IQ tests
present questions by speaking to
the person being examined. The person has to listen to receive the questions
and explanations needed to complete the test. Therefore, individual
intelligence tests like the Stanford-Binet, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary
Test, and Wechsler intelligence scales for children and adults can be
thought of largely as listening tests.

The second reason that the concept of "reading potential" is important in
adult literacy education is that it is frequently thought that adults in
need of literacy education have lived a reasonably long time and developed
fairly high levels of competence in oral language, including vocabulary and
comprehension ability for listening. Therefore, it is assumed, unlike
children, whose oral language skills are not well developed yet and who
must acquire higher levels of vocabulary while also learning to read,
adults will be able to acquire a fairly high level of literacy in a brief
time, relative to that required by children.  This leads to the expectation
that the adult's literacy problems may be solved fairly quickly with a
relatively brief period of training in some form of decoding the written
word to utilize the vast amount of competence already possessed in the oral
language.

However, when some 2,000 adults were assessed to compare their skills in
both listening and reading, the anticipated higher level of listening
ability, particularly at the lower levels of reading (down to the 2nd
grade) as indicated by the Gates-MacGinitie reading test, did not emerge
when listening to comprehend paragraphs.

The data mentioned above  were obtained using group administered tests in
which the listening and reading measures were equated as closely as
possible in content, time to listen or read, and difficulty of the
questions, which were all multiple-choice requiring recall of factual
information.

The chapter by Sticht and James (1984) provides an extensive review of
listening and reading studies with adults. In one study, using the same
group test as used to obtain the data  given above,  an incarcerated prison
population of men reading at the 4th grade level showed about 1.5 grade
levels of "potential."

Using a different group administered test of listening and reading skills,
the Durrell Listening and Reading Series tests, Sticht (1978) reported that
for 71 native speakers of English who were in an adult literacy program
their average reading level was at the 4.8 grade level, while their reading
"potential" was 6.0. Interestingly, for 45 adults with English as a second
language, their reading score was 4.8 while their reading "potential" score
was at the 4.4 grade level. In other words, their listening skills were
lower than their reading skills, so when the listening score was converted
to a reading "potential" score, they performed below their actual reading
level!

Using the Diagnostic Reading Scales, which are administered one-on-one as an
individual test, Sticht & Beck (1976) assessed the reading "potential" of 42
native English speakers and 32 English as a second language speakers in an
adult literacy




program. The native speakers had an average reading level at the 6.2 grade
level and a "potential" at the grade 6.4 level. The non-native English
speakers read at an average 4.3 grade level and had a "potential" at the
4.4 grade level.

Generally speaking, the studies cited suggest that adults with lower levels
of literacy tend to also have lower levels of oral language (listening)
comprehension (though note the use of the word "tend" because this is not
true of all adults). This tends to be true for both vocabulary knowledge
and the comprehension of connected discourse. Of course, there can be
important exceptions to these general trend data. But as a rule, these data
on listening and reading suggest that adult literacy educators will have to
provide the least able adult readers (less than 4th grade abilities) with 
not only effective instruction in "phonemics","phonics" and other decoding
knowledge, but also extensive opportunities for these adults to develop
lots of new vocabulary and content knowledge to improve both their oral and
written language comprehension abilities.

Reference
Sources for all  of the studies cited above, and many others exploring
listening and reading skills of  adults, may be found in Thomas G. Sticht &
J.  H. James (1984). Listening and Reading. In R. Barr, M. Kamil, and P.
Mosenthal ( Eds.) Handbook of Reading Research. New York: Longmans.



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