Supply and Demand for Literacy Instruction in the United States

The supply-demand equations for adult literacy instruction in the United States are complicated by (a) changing demands for basic skils in the workplace, (b) an increased in immigrants who have limited command of English, (c) changing federal welfare policies, and (d) limited awareness on the part of those with low reading and writing ability that their skills are not sufficient for everyday literacy needs. This paper reviews critical features of the supply of literacy instruction, drawing on recent state and national surveys of service providers and of technology; data on the demand for literacy instruction; the recent National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS); and studies of adult literacy participation. Attention is given especially to the types of data that are required for modeling of supply and demand. The paper concludes that the supply-demand characteristics in U.S. literacy policy have not been well understood, that supply and demand are often poorly equlibriated, and that recent national studies can provide useful guidance toward providing a better balance between supply and demand

Toward Defining Literacy

Literacy is a topic much on the public\u27s mind these days. It is one of those subjects on which all laypersons think they are experts. When it comes time, however, to establish measures of illiteracy rates or to set policies, it becomes apparent that we know less than we thought we did. It is small comfort to know that specialists also have their differences

Deriving and Tabulating English Spelling-to-Sound Correspondences

A series of programs has been written for deriving and tabulating English spelling-to-sound and sound-to-spelling correspondences. One program scans the spelling and pronunciation of a word and decides which sounds in the pronunciation are derived from which letters in the spelling. Alternate vowel and consonant clusters are formed in each symbol string (spelling and pronunciation) and are matched by a routine that searches for such irregularities as silent letters and vocalic consonants. A dictionary containing the spelling and pronunciation of approximately 20,000 English words is the input to this program. The output is a separate record for each spelling-to-sound correspondence in a word, including the spelling of the word, its code number in the dictionary, its frequency of occurrence, and the correspondence type (consonant or vowel). These records are then sorted and input to another program which tabulates the frequency of occurrence of every spelling-to-sound and sound-to-spelling correspondence found by the first program. Separate tabulations are made for the different positions which the spelling cluster occupies in the words in which it appears (initial, medial, and final positions). This information along with the words which comprise each correspondence statistic are then listed . Separate listings of these same data for the 5,000 most common words in English, and for the graphic monosyllables have also been obtained, along with reversed and alphabetized lists of spellings and of pronunciations. Data obtained from this study represent the most complete tabulation of spelling-to-sound and sound-to-spelling correspondences ever compiled. These results have formed the basis of a recently published analysis of Fnglish orthography and are being used in a number of universities in research aimed towards the improvement of reading and spelling instruction

Storage, Retrieval, and Editing of Information for a Dictionary

The purpose of this paper is to describe the progress and future plans for the automation of the Dictionary of American Regional English. Although most of the problems which are discussed have already been tackled by others -- optical scanning, file maintenance, retrieval of semantic information, on-line editing -- the combination of these items to produce a dictionary has never been attempted before. While parts of dictionary production have been computer-aided, no lexicographer has yet tried to automate, to a high degree, the storage, retrieval, and editing of information for a large dictionary. Although the discussion that follows concerns only the techniques which have been developed for the current dictionary, these processes are equally applicable to the compilation not only of other dictionaries, but of any publications which are derived from vast, complex stores of data

Venezky, Richard L., Texbooks in School and Society, pp. 436-462 in Philip W. Jackson, ed., Handbook of Research on Curriculum. New York: Macmillan, 1992.

Defines the nature and value of textbooks in U. S. schools, reviews the control of the content of textbooks, and traces the historical evolution of school textbooks