Field Noteswritten for this archive, November 10, 2026

Teaching adults who are new to print

“It’s hard for individuals to learn to speak and read in English when they cannot read in their own language.” Nancy Faux, the ESOL specialist who organized the Richmond LESLLA forum, said that in the Institute’s November 2006 press release. It sounds obvious. In practice most adult English classes in the United States were, and are, built on the opposite assumption: that the learner already reads, and only needs the new language.

This note is about the adults for whom that assumption fails. It draws on what the LESLLA network has published since the workshops in Tilburg (2005) and Richmond (2006), and on the classroom habits that tutors who work with this group tend to arrive at.

Who the learners are

The research names a small group with a big presence in some classrooms. They are adult immigrants and refugees who had little or no schooling before arriving. Some come from places where war closed the schools. Some are women who were kept home while brothers went. Some grew up speaking a language with no widely used written form. In Virginia in the 2000s that meant, among others, Somali, Sudanese, Afghan, Burmese, Bhutanese and Central American adults; the mix has shifted since, but the profile has not.

These adults are usually fluent, often multilingual speakers. They run households, keep accounts in their heads, and get through government offices on memory and the help of relatives. What they have not had is the chance to learn what a written page is.

What reading does to the mind

The most surprising finding in this field predates LESLLA. In 1979 José Morais and colleagues tested adults in rural Portugal who had never learned to read, alongside neighbors who had learned as adults. Asked to add or remove the first sound of a made-up spoken word, the adults who had learned to read managed easily. The non-readers mostly could not. The study appeared in the journal Cognition that year. Phonemes, the individual sounds that letters stand for, turn out to be something people learn to hear by learning an alphabet, not something every speaker notices.

Jeanne Kurvers, whose three papers open the Richmond proceedings, found related effects in the Netherlands. Adults who could not read had trouble saying where one word ends and the next begins in a spoken sentence; they tended to hear meaningful chunks rather than words. Her paper with Roeland van Hout and Ton Vallen in the same volume, “Literacy and Word Boundaries”, sets out that effect in detail.

Elaine Tarone, Martha Bigelow and Kit Hansen looked at what this means for speaking. Working with Somali adults and teenagers in Minnesota, they found that learners with stronger alphabetic literacy were better at noticing and repeating a corrected form when a teacher recast what they had said. In a 2006 TESOL Quarterly study of eight Somali adults with limited schooling, led by Bigelow, the more literate learners recalled the teacher’s corrections significantly better than the less literate ones. The Richmond paper grew into the book Literacy and Second Language Oracy (Oxford, 2009). The upshot is that literacy does not sit on top of spoken language like a separate skill. It changes how adults attend to language in the first place.

Why the usual beginner class fails them

Open a typical beginning ESL textbook and count what it takes for granted:

• that a page is read from top left to bottom right;
• that a drawing of a bus stands for a bus;
• that a blank line means “write here”, and a box means “tick”;
• that words are separated by spaces and that each one can be looked at alone;
• that a list can be scanned instead of read word by word.

None of these is natural. Each is a convention learned in school, usually by age seven. An adult who missed that stage meets all of them at once, in a language they are still learning to speak, often in a class where everyone else is moving faster. Many drop out and blame themselves.

Classroom moves that work

The practices below come up again and again in LESLLA presentations and teacher guides. None is exotic. What makes them work is doing them on purpose and for long enough.

Start from talk the learners own

The Language Experience Approach is the old standby. The class does something together, a walk to the bus stop, a cooking session, a visit to the clinic. Then learners tell the story and the teacher writes their exact words on the board. That text becomes the reading material. Learners already know what it says, so they can concentrate on how the marks line up with the words.

Whole, then part, then whole

Read the short text together for meaning. Then pull out a few words and work on them: the first sound, the letter, other words that start the same way. Then go back to the whole text and read it again. Pure phonics drills with no meaning lose adult learners quickly; pure memorization of whole words stalls after a few dozen. Moving between the two keeps both going.

Use photographs, and real print

Line drawings are a convention too. Clear photographs of real objects, ideally taken in the learners’ own neighborhood, are easier to read. So is real print: a bus schedule, a pharmacy label, a school notice, a pay stub. Adults want to read the things in their lives, and those texts carry their own motivation.

Teach the page itself

Show what a margin is, where the name goes, how a form is laid out, why there is a line between questions. Practise holding a pencil and forming letters on paper with guide lines. Teach the mechanics of tests early, including bubbling an answer, because placement and progress tests will assume them.

Go slower and repeat more than feels necessary

A new word or letter might need to come back on many different days before it sticks. That is not a failure of the learner; it is what learning a code from scratch looks like at any age. Tutors trained on faster classes often move on too soon.

Watch for vision, hearing and fatigue

Many adults in this group have never had an eye test, and some have undiagnosed learning disabilities; VALRC kept a specialist for exactly that, Lauren Ellington in 2010. Some work night shifts or care for small children. Reading glasses from a pharmacy rack, or a class moved to a better hour, can do more than a new curriculum.

When learners move up

The goal of all this is a learner who reads well enough to move into ordinary ESL and adult education classes, and then into the paperwork of working life. That transition deserves attention of its own. Some will sit the GED, and its argument essay is a large step for a recent beginner; The GED essay breaks it down. The first job application, the first résumé, the first workplace e-mail arrive quickly and in a register these learners have never been taught. A practical guide such as this walk-through on writing a résumé in English as a second-language speaker is worth having on hand when a former beginner reaches that stage, as a model to talk through together rather than a form to copy.

What programs can measure

Funding systems in adult education count progress by moving learners up levels on standardized tests. For adults starting from no print literacy, the first level can take far longer than funders expect, and real gains (writing one’s name and address, reading a bus number, signing a form with understanding) do not always show up on the test. LESLLA researchers have argued for years that this group needs benchmarks of its own. Some European programs set separate literacy tracks with smaller steps, and several U.S. states describe a pre-literacy stage within their ESOL levels.

Virginia’s contribution, through the Institute and VALRC, was mostly in teacher training, carried out by specialists such as Kate Daly, who supported ESOL and GED programs around the state: the 2006 forum, the CAELA certification work and the Standards in Action pilot all aimed to make teachers better at seeing what a given learner actually needs.

Where to read further

• The LESLLA website, leslla.org, which keeps the symposium proceedings. In 2017 the network changed what its name stands for, to Literacy Education and Second Language Learning for Adults.
• José Morais, Luz Cary, Jesús Alegria and Paul Bertelson, “Does awareness of speech as a sequence of phones arise spontaneously?” Cognition, 1979.
• Elaine Tarone, Martha Bigelow and Kit Hansen, Literacy and Second Language Oracy, Oxford University Press, 2009.
• The contents of the 2006 Richmond proceedings, including Kurvers, Bigelow, Muth, Young-Scholten and Peyton.