[Reading-hall-of-fame] Adult Oracy in America

[tsticht at znet.com]

May 6, 2010

Adult Oracy in America


Tom Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education


The 1993 report Adult Literacy in America, based on the National Adult
Literacy Survey (NALS) lead the U. S. Department of Education to claim that
almost half of America’s adults were functionally illiterate. A decade
later, the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) reiterated that
claim.


There can be no doubt that functional illiteracy maims the ability of adults
to achieve well in contemporary life. However, there are a number of
emerging factors that suggest that not only is literacy a problem, millions
of adults may also be functionally inorate, that is, their abilities to
speak, listen, and converse well in the oral language are so poorly
developed as to pose problems in achievement, too. And here I am not
talking about foreign-born, non-English speaking immigrants. I am talking
about adults born in the United States who speak English as their native
language.


All the major studies of the essential skills that adults need to work
effectively, raise families, and engage in community activities point to
the importance of oral communication skills: listening and speaking. In
1991 the Secretary of Labor’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills
(SCANS) identified listening and speaking as foundation skills for success
in America’s workforce. In the latter half of the decade of the 1990s, the
National Institute for Literacy’s Equipped for the Future project
identified listening and speaking as part of what adults need to know and
be able to do for success in family, work, and community life roles.


Despite the widely held expectations for oracy (defined by Andrew Wilkinson
in the 1960s as speaking and listening)  skills in life in America, I have
found no national assessments of adult’s oracy skills. However, there are a
number of studies that confirm the need for a deeper understanding of adult
oracy. The seminal work of Betty Hart and Todd Risley reported in their
book, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American
Children (Brookes, 1995,) revealed huge differences in the amount of oracy
in homes where parents were either professional, working class, or welfare
groups. The professional homes produced millions of more words of speech
for their children to listen to than did the homes of working class or
welfare parents. This resulted in large differences in the oracy skills
(vocabulary) of the children, and in turn this contributed to differences
in reading achievement when the children went to school.


In 1996 and again in 2001 colleagues and I reported on surveys of adult’s
vocabulary, political, and cultural knowledge assessed by telephone. In
this case, the interviewer used speech to talk with the respondents and the
latter listened. What we found was that there was a wide range of vocabulary
and cultural knowledge amongst the adults, all of whom were English
speakers, and there were significant relationships of oracy (listening)
with educational achievement, occupational status, and income.


In studies of the reading components of the International Adult Literacy
Survey (IALS, 2003), researchers used oracy tests for assessing vocabulary
knowledge and memory for number sequences. They found that these orally
presented tests were positively related to performance on the prose
literacy tests of the IALS. Out of a possible 1.0 relationship, the oral
vocabulary test correlated at plus .59 while the memory for numbers test
correlated plus .69 with the IALS prose literacy tests. These correlations
were higher than those for the reading skills of word recognition.


In military-related research, colleagues and I found that listening to
spoken passages and answering questions about them later was as highly
related to the performance of real job tasks, such as cooks making
scrambled eggs, automobile repairman fixing a broken wheel bearing, etc as
was a reading test. Later, we developed a special test to measure both
listening and reading comprehension and found that there were high
relationships between these two modes of communication. Poorly literate
young adults were also likely to perform poorly when listening to passages
and then answering questions about them. This is the sort of listening one
does in school lecture classes.


While as mentioned, I have found no national assessments of adult oracy
skills for native English speakers, the data mentioned above and numerous
studies with children, from pre-school though K-12, indicate that oracy is
a major contributor to the acquisition of good literacy skills. The need
for good listening and speaking skills is ubiquitous in higher education.
Oracy is the primary mechanism for the intergenerational transfer of
language and literacy from parents to their children. Oracy is used on the
radio and television to inform and persude listeners into action. And oracy
is always included amongst the skills employers say they need when hiring
their workforce. For these reasons, we need to focus as much attention upon
the development of oracy as we do upon literacy with both children and
adults.


In the beginning was the word
..and it was spoken! But was it understood?


tsticht at aznet.net