Improving Adult Literacy Outcomes: Lessons from Cognitive Research for Developing Countries

Teaching basic reading skills to one billion adult illiterates in the world is challenging. Adult literacy programs in developing countries often have low efficiency and may make relatively few participants literate. Efforts to improve outcomes have focused on institutional development, adult education philosophy, textbooks, motivation, and social issues. Little attention has been paid to the cognitive mechanisms that enable the learners' brains to perceive and interpret written patterns in a few milliseconds. Yet, considerable research has been conducted in this area since brain imaging became possible, partly to remedy dyslexia, that is frequent in industrialized countries. Improving Adult Literacy Outcomes summarizes pertinent research in layman terms and applies findings to the acquisition of literacy by unschooled adults in lower-income countries.