The Abilities and Deficits in Reading and Writing of Low Literate Adults

Abstract

Low literacy skills in adulthood have been associated mainly with a difficulty in reading comprehension. The question arises whether the difficulty of low literate adults is restricted to the complex task of reading comprehension or whether deficits can be traced back to the more basic reading and writing skills. This question will be examined in the present article based on previously published empirical studies of that population. The available data indicate deficits of these adults not only in reading comprehension, but also in the very basic components of reading and writing such as decoding, orthographic knowledge, word recognition and spelling, in addition to deficits in reading fluency. Alongside these broad deficits, the results also indicate large variance within adults participating in basic education and literacy classes, as a considerable proportion of those adults do not exhibit extreme deficits across the different reading and writing components.