“You couldn’t ask for more important work.” This is how John Strucker, a researcher with the Harvard Graduate School of Education, describes the intensive and rewarding process of teaching adults to become better readers.

Strucker represents one of several partners in a federally funded study involving 300 adult reading students—more than 100 of whom are students at the Community College of Rhode Island this semester.

Entitled “Improving the Instruction of Adult Basic Education: Intermediate Readers,” this research study hopes to show whether a computerized speech recognition program called Soliloquy and a special curriculum based on the successful Girls and Boys Town Reading Program can positively impact the learning curve of intermediate adult readers. In particular, the study hopes to see if it can improve the readers’ fluency through the software program and the vocabulary through the curriculum program.

Soliloquy, created by nationally recognized reading scholar Marilyn Jager Adams, is a cross between a speech recognition program and an automated language lab. Students use headsets to read passages aloud that the computer then processes. Not only does the software compute each student’s accuracy and reading rates, it also audibly corrects any mispronunciations immediately after they occur. “Soliloquy software,” says Assistant Professor Holly Susi, coordinator of CCRI’s participation in the study, “becomes the endlessly patient tutor.”

Students in Instructor Brenda Micheletti's class use Soliloquy software to improve their literacy.

The Girls and Boys Town-based curriculum, adapted for adult use by Lesley University’s Mary Beth Curtis, helps increase each student’s vocabulary, and ultimately, his or her fluency. “Our goal is for students to make meaning from what they are reading. If they focus on the word level too much, it affects their overall comprehension,” says Susi.

Combined, Strucker and his colleagues hope to have discovered what he calls “reading vitamins” that help speed up students’ growth in the literacy area. Unlike a young child just learning to read, Strucker explains, “If an adult gets to a community college and still needs to improve his reading, he hasn’t got forever to do it.” Therefore, the dual strategies he is researching are focused ones that he hopes will improve adult reading levels in the shortest amount of time possible.

Susi concurs. “We are going to see if we can move more students to the next level more quickly,” she says.

While 24 classrooms at 11 New England sites are involved in this study, CCRI represents the largest individual contributor. All participating CCRI students are enrolled this semester in English 0850. Not all are using the software and the curriculum in tandem, however. To be scientifically accurate, researchers must offer four different research conditions; this means that some classrooms will use the software while others use a pen-and-paper version; some teachers will use the adapted curriculum, while some will rely on their original curriculum from previous semesters. Students are tested in the processes that underlie reading both at the beginning and the conclusion of the semester.

As part of the study, CCRI faculty member Assistant Professor Paula Domenico is currently using the software in her reading classroom. “What it really does is save the student from the embarrassment of reading aloud and making mistakes…in front of an entire classroom,” she says. She also says that the software does more than increase students’ fluency and comprehension. “I think it increases their level of confidence in even attempting to use multi-syllabic words,” Domenico says.

CCRI faculty member Assistant Professor Dina Levitre is working with the opposite scenario from Domenico. Levitre is using the Lesley University curriculum, along with a pen-and-pencil version of the computer software. In this scenario, students read designated passages independently, then test themselves and self-correct. “There are definitely elements of this that I would like to keep in my classroom next semester” after the study is completed, Levitre says. In particular, she appreciates the emphasis on fluency and vocabulary. “I like the way the vocabulary format really demands that the students interact with the words. They have to look at relationships between words and develop their own context with the words in order to make sense out of them,” she says.

All four of the classroom scenarios involved in the study also emphasize reading aloud in a group setting. Levitre calls this “popcorn reading,” where one student reads three to five sentences before appointing another student as the class reader. Because students cannot tell in advance when they will be called upon, Strucker adds that this method forces students to really focus on their listening skills.

While the CCRI professors may be quick to praise facets of this program, Strucker is quick to praise the CCRI faculty involved. “On the whole I’m really impressed with the quality of the CCRI teachers,” he says. “They are dedicated, they know what they are doing, and they really care what happens to their students.”

He also feels that community colleges, with their technological capabilities and their stable faculty base, are the best place for adults to improve their reading skills. Citing research that points to community colleges as the most important incubators of the nation’s workforce, Strucker considers two-year institutions the access point for lifelong continuing education. “All across developed countries, people really need good high school levels of literacy. Then they can access continuing education throughout their lives. The question then becomes, ‘Have you got enough of a literacy and basic skills foundation to be able to go back to community college and access those opportunities for lifelong learning?’
“Our target groups, intermediate readers, are very important because they are very close to acquiring those skills. They are nearly there. If they achieve, then we can enable them to make big changes in their lives. If we fail in developmental reading classes, then they are not able to take advantage of those opportunities,” says Strucker.

While this study looks at how to improve adult reading skills, it does not uncover the causes of adult reading problems. CCRI Professor Jean Dietrich, an expert in developmental reading, sheds more light on the process of learning to read. “After about third grade, we don’t do a lot with reading in the public schools. By that age, you are reading to learn, not learning to read,” she says. “If you don’t get it by then, you’re in a quandary. You have to figure out how to cope, because it takes you longer than other people, and you don’t understand what other people understand.”

Because there is such a stigma attached to being an adult with limited reading skills, much of a low-reading adult’s energy is spent covering up the problem. “Students will tell me about the tricks they used when they don’t know how to spell something, like asking someone ‘Could you spell that for me?’ or ‘Could you write that down?’” Dietrich says. She even gives the example of a student who had such trouble with phonetics that she could not use a dictionary. “A dictionary is too hard if you don’t know what comes after the first letter,” she says. Instead, the enterprising student used the yellow pages of the phonebook, which is organized by recognizable categories, to find the correct spellings of words. “If she needed to spell ‘mortgage,’ she would look up an ad for ‘banking,' ” Dietrich says.

While there are many strategies for both children and adults who need help with reading, there are limits to what a community college program can expect to accomplish, Dietrich says. She laments that she does not have the necessary time and resources to treat severe literacy problems effectively in a college setting, and stressed that adult basic education programs need to be part of a larger solution.

But, she is delighted that, through the intermediate reader study, she and her CCRI colleagues are helping to test strategies and interventions that could positively impact a significant portion of the community college population. And, if Strucker and his colleagues are able to demonstrate that the software and the curriculum they are testing does in fact speed up the learning curve, they have pledged to train all CCRI reading faculty in these methods, free of charge. This could place CCRI on the cutting edge of adult literacy training.

“We all feel like pioneers,” says Susi.