Abstract
The purpose of this case series was to explore whether adults who did not have the opportunity to acquire reading skills during childhood are able to do so rapidly if trained with an adequate literacy program. After 14 weeks of training with a new, optimized, literacy course based on cognitive research, six out of eight participants became able to read words they had never encountered, hence demonstrating that they were definitely engaged in decoding processes that allow autonomous reading. Moreover, they showed enhanced phonemic sensitivity and phonological memory. The latter finding implies that functional changes can take place rapidly outside the reading domain even when reading is acquired in adulthood. Thus, there is no major plasticity impediment preventing rapid eradication of illiteracy in adults.
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Notes
As acknowledged by UNESCO (2016), these data may overestimate actual literacy levels, as they are not based on any test but rather on either self- and third-party declarations or educational attainment proxies.
With this formula, performance at T5 would remain unchanged if a participant succeeded to proceed until module 17, but would be lowered if the participant stopped the test before the end (being thus presented with easier items than one who succeeded in completing the test). The corrected score thus underestimates performance for students who did not reach the end of the test because of time limit. Yet, corrected and uncorrected (calculated on GPCs of modules 3–8) slopes and RGs were strongly correlated, r(6) = .87 and = .89, respectively, both ps < .01, suggesting that our estimation is valid.
We considered this score in correlation computation because the slopes on old and new items were strongly correlated, r(6) = .96.
This analysis took only into account the seven participants who had learned to read to some extent.
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Acknowledgements
Régine Kolinsky is Research Director of the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FRS)–FNRS, Belgium. This work was supported by the FRS-FNRS under grant FRFC 2.4515.12 and by an Interuniversity Attraction Poles (IAP) Grant 7/33, Belspo. We warmly thank the non-governmental community center that lent its facilities for the literacy course and testing, and are very grateful to the participants for agreeing to be enrolled in the course. We also sincerely thank the Editor and the two anonymous Reviewers for their very constructive comments and suggestions, which we believe have led to a significant improvement of the original manuscript.
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Kolinsky, R., Leite, I., Carvalho, C. et al. Completely illiterate adults can learn to decode in 3 months. Read Writ 31, 649–677 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-017-9804-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-017-9804-7