Recent legislation and education standards focus on the importance of developing students' academic and professional writing skills. Research on the teaching of writing has articulated the types of texts and features of writing that students need to produce to succeed. At the same time, studies of writing in adult education have found that limited…

We present a community-based research project aimed at identifying effective methods and materials for teaching English literacy skills to adult English as a second language emergent readers. We conducted a quasi-experimental study whereby we evaluated the efficacy of two approaches, one based on current practices at the English Skills Learning…

This article describes the complex cognitive and linguistic challenges of summarizing expository text at vocabulary, syntactic, and rhetorical levels. It then outlines activities to help ABE/ESL learners develop corresponding skills.

Adult immigrants bring rich experiences to the English as a Second Language (ESL) literacy classroom, and these experiences, which are often fraught with emotion, can influence how they participate in the learning process. In community-based classrooms, where teachers typically have the flexibility to create their own curriculum, there are many…

A recent overhaul to the GED exam has made it significantly more difficult for all students to pass, further adding to the burden of those who must take it in a second language. The revamped 2014 version of the exam highlights the need for accommodations for speakers of minority languages who must take the test in English. In fact, there is plenty…

Correctional Education English as a Second Language (ESL) literacy programs vary from state to state, region to region. Some states enroll their correctional ESL students in adult basic education (ABE) classes; other states have separate classes and programs. At the Maryland Correctional Institution in Jessup, the ESL class is a self-contained…

The factors determining foreign language abilities have received copious attention from foreign language studies, and these research findings provided highly converging pedagogical implications for language teachers. However, not many studies have focused on non-academic learners especially with respect to their literacy skills. To fill this gap,…

The purpose of this study was to examine how frequently adult education English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teachers in Florida used specific culturally responsive teaching practices and how important they believed those practices were to their teaching. Using Ginsberg and Wlodkowski's…

Adult immigrants are invaluable assets to our society as they bring along their cultural capital across borders. However, little is known about how their rich life histories reflect and refract their plights as ESL learners. This study is an investigation of three adult immigrants' English learning in an immigration center in the Midwest. The…

When adult ESL (English as a Second Language) learners enter our classrooms with little or no first language literacy, their instructors teach them to read for the first time in an unfamiliar language. It is a tremendous task, and the context for teaching "adult emergent readers" is complex. This complexity is coupled with a growing, but still…

According to the U.S. Department of Education (2004), more than 40% of approximately three million learners in the federally-funded adult education programs are in the area of English as a second language (ESL). These learners, the majority of whom are immigrants and refugees, represent a huge diversity of cultural backgrounds and nationalities,…

This study examined how parental participation in Even Start programs contributes to family literacy engagement and parental development. More specifically, its primary aim was to develop an understanding of how parental participation in the program influences their reading behaviors and other literacy practices as well as to highlight observed…

This article reports on a study that examines the effects of metacognitive reading strategy instruction on reading performance of adult ESL learners with limited English and literacy skills. The strategy instruction was implemented over a period of four months with a group of 18 learners who were enrolled in a high beginning literacy course in an…