From the archiveProceedings contents page, captured July 2011
Low-Educated Second Language and Literacy Acquisition: Research, Policy, and Practice
Proceedings of the Second Annual Forum. Published by The Literacy Institute at Virginia Commonwealth University. The original page took orders for print copies through the Virginia Adult Learning Resource Center.
Contents
Foreword — Mark Emblidge
Research
| Paper | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| Social and Cultural Capital at School: The Case of a Somali Teenage Girl | Martha H. Bigelow |
| Development of Word Recognition Skills of Adult L2 Beginning Readers | Jeanne Kurvers |
| Literacy and Word Boundaries | Jeanne Kurvers, Roeland van Hout, and Ton Vallen |
| Memory, Second Language Reading, and Lexicon: A Comparison Between Successful and Less Successful Adults and Children | Jeanne Kurvers and Ineke Van de Craats |
| A Reading Components Assessment of English Language Literacy Learners in U.S. Prisons | Bill Muth |
| The Impact of Alphabetic Print Literacy Level on Oral Second Language Acquisition | Elaine Tarone, Martha Bigelow, and Kit Hansen |
| The Role of Literacy in the Development of L2 Morpho-Syntax from an Organic Grammar Perspective | Anne Vainikka and Martha Young-Scholten |
| Obstacles on Highway L2 | Ineke Van de Craats |
Policy
| Paper | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| Literacy in East Timor | Danielle Boon |
| A More Perfect Union: A National Citizenship Plan | Jeff Chenoweth |
| Adult ESOL in England: Policy, Practice, and Research | James Simpson |
Practice
| Paper | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| Professional Development for Practitioners Working with Adult English Language Learners with Limited Literacy | Joy Kreeft Peyton, Miriam Burt, Sharon McKay, Kirsten Schaetzel, Lynda Terrill, Sarah Young, Judith Alamprese, and Andy Nash |
| Teaching, Learning, and Speaking: Observation and Assessing Oral Language Production of the Non-literate Adult Learner in the Second Language Classroom | Susanna Strube |
Recommendations
Recommendations to Further the Field of Low-educated Second Language and Literacy Acquisition – for Adults in the Areas of Research, Practice, and Public Policy
The original contents page spelled the country “East Timnor”; it is corrected above.
Added in 2026: why this volume still gets cited
Two papers here became reference points. Tarone, Bigelow and Hansen showed that adults with stronger alphabetic print literacy noticed and repeated spoken grammar more accurately, an early sign that reading ability shapes oral language learning too; the team expanded the study into the book Literacy and Second Language Oracy (Oxford, 2009). Kurvers’ work on word recognition and word boundaries helped explain why adults who never learned to read in any language struggle with something as basic as where one word ends. Both strands are discussed in Teaching adults who are new to print.
Questions readers ask
Can I download the papers here?
No. The original site linked each title to a PDF, and the authors hold the rights to their papers. Most can be found through the LESLLA proceedings archive at leslla.org or by searching the title.
Who published the proceedings?
The Literacy Institute at Virginia Commonwealth University, after the forum it hosted on 2–3 November 2006.