Online Reading and Writing Adult Learner Resources

Submitted by Jessie Stadd on Tue, 04/28/2015 - 11:47
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Did you know that LINCS currently provides resources for adult learners in the form of America’s Literacy Directory? What other resources do adult learners need in order further their own education and training in the area of reading and writing? For example, TV411 has online videos related to reading, vocabulary, and writing. What other online resources do your students use?

Comments

Jessie and others,

The Center for the Study of Adult Literacy (CSAL) offers a great free library of adult literacy readings at http://csal.gsu.edu/content/are-you-learner . The readings have three levels: Easier, Medium and Harder, and  include these topics:

HEALTH  |  FOOD  |   BABIES  |  CHILDREN AGES 2-12  |  TEENAGERS  |  FAMILIES  |  ADVICE  | 
NON-FICTION (REAL LIFE STORIES)  |  FICTION (MADE-UP STORIES)  |  JOBS and WORK  |  MONEY  |  HISTORY  |  SCIENCE  |  OTHER

David J. Rosen

djrosen123@gmail.com

 

Thank you Jessie and David for the helpful resources. Until very recently, it was difficult to find anything online that our adult learners could use, given the high reading levels posted everywhere. Don't you love it when pages are geared to our adult learners?

Hopefully, others will jump in with even more links for us to explore!  In fact, I think I'll compile your entries for later access. Stay "posted" and stay vocal!

Leecy
Moderator, Reading and Writing Community

Leecy, Jessie, and others,

For many years I have been collecting and adding resources to The Literacy List. Within it, is a section called Easy Reading for Adult Learners. (Within that, is a link to an Adult Literacy Education (ALE) Wiki page called Learner Perspectives: Student Writing with many links to adult learners' writings -- good readings for other adult learners.) There are many websites on the Easy Reading for Adult Learners web page that have easy reading collections for adult learners, including Easy English Times, GCF LearnFree, Marshall Adult Education and many others.

Of course, if you are aware of good websites with suitable readings for adult basic skills learners that you think should be included in this section of the Literacy List, please let me know.

David J. Rosen

djrosen123@gmail.com

 

David, I commented earlier that I would compile resources offered in this CoP and post them online for all to access as we go along. However, your list is an ideal repository for recommendations. For those who wish to add reading and writing resources to your site, should we send links and comments to you directly? Also, as members share links in this forum, would you like for me to send those to you to be included in The Literacy List?

And while I'm on a roll here, would you consider adding a topic for Diversity and Literacy? Since I moderate that CoP as well, I would like to encourage those members to add to The Literacy List as well.

Thanks much!

Leecy
Moderator, Reading and Writing Community

Thanks, Leecy. I would be glad to consider adding reading and web site recommendations to The Literacy List. People could continue to post them here and I'll see them or, if you or they prefer, they could email them to me. It is helpful to teachers if there is a one or two-line description of a website, so if you are recommending a site you know well, please take the time to write that, too, if possible. 

David J, Rosen

djrosen123@gmail.com

 

David,

Thanks for sharing our resource-you beat me to it! I would love to get feedback on this resource! And more information will follow, but for now please save the date: May 29th at 2:00 PM EST, when Center staff will be sharing an update on our Center's work. Our federally funded Center focuses on understanding the underlying reading, cognitive, and motivational processes of adults who read between the 3rd and 8th grade levels, and developing instructional approaches to help them improve their reading skills (csal.gsu.edu).

Daphne

 

David has recommended a really great site for reading materials for adult students. It is definitely worth a look. Two other sites that I recommend are www.newsela.com, which has news articles that can be read or printed out at different grade levels, and www.readworks.org which has passages and question sets at different reading levels. Both of these resources are free.

I appreciated the succinct videos on reading and writing strategies.  I wondered if there are resources for assisting adult learners with online reading skills?  I think many adults are challenged by the demands of reading information online.

Hi Mary,

One way to look at this problem is that students need to learn how to figure out the design of websites and how to navigate them, some basic design features, such as menu bars, dropdown menus, how to search a web site, how to distinguish descriptive content from opinion content and advertisements, how to figure out the sponsor of the website, and enough variations on each feature so they can feel comfortable using nearly any website. Beyond that, the prose reading skills are pretty much the same as reading hard copy.

Another way is to choose reading websites that are well designed for adult learners who are trying to improve their reading skills. They strip out the complexity and complications of most websites. Let me know if you are interested in seeing a list of these easy reading websites, many of which are free.

Which approach(es)interest(s) you?

David J. Rosen

djrosen123@gmail.com

Mary, thanks for asking. I know David has a huge list of resources, and he comments on a number of challenges that adult learners may face before feeling comfortable reading online.

Starting students off with easy-reading sites that offer engaging content for adults is a good place to start, as long as a tutor or instructor lead them through their initial experiences. I love games, too, and the Web is filled with many that offer reading and vocabulary practice.  I know others will be posting great links here, and I'll come back with a few of my own! Leecy

One thing that seems to make reading online a little difficult at first is that the brain seems to process text on a computer screen and text on a printed page in different ways. Even if you are a fluid reader of the printed word, it takes time and practice to reach the same level of fluency with the electronic word.

Using myself as an example, when I first started reading online many years ago, I found it difficult to read more than a few pages at a time online. My attention quickly began to drift and I did not retain as much as I would have had I been reading print. Because of the wealth of free reading material on the Internet until I was reading almost everything online. Gradually, I was able to read longer and longer works and am now able to read anything I was able to read in print with as much retention. The key seems to have been persistence and practice. I’ve grown so comfortable with the online reading experience that I sometimes catch myself tapping on a word in a book to look up a definition on those few occasions when I now read print.

On the other hand, the lack of Internet availability forces me to use print books with my learners, which has turned out to be a blessing in disguise. If Internet were available at my program’s teaching sites, I would have automatically had my learners read online. Being forced to use print, I discovered that --  initially, at least -- it provides a better learning experience than electronic. When everyone is looking at the computer screen, the focus is on that. With print, we’re communicating on multiple levels, which helps the learner learn.

Robert, you've found the silver lining! :) I hope that your students will eventually practice reading online, however, since that's the nature of current interactions these days.

I wonder if you could find someone to donate an overhead LCD projector. Sometimes TechSoup.org has good deals on equipment, but at the moment, I notice they don't have anything on that. The idea is to share the online text on a large screen and highlight the lines as everyone then reads together. That makes for great reading practice (Neurological Impress or Duet Reading strategy), and it might begin to make online reading easier. Leecy

Leecy,

I'm finally getting around to your comment, 10 days late.

As a workaround to having no Internet, I have used a projector in the past to project reading materials on the wall for everyone in the class to take turns reading aloud. It worked great. I would place the reading materials on a flash drive or CD and insert them into an ancient desktop computer I connected to the projector. If I had audio, also played that, to give them practice listening and speaking the text.

When I have only a few learners, I connect a laptop to an old 24" monitor and use that instead of the projector.

The process works great.

David,

Whenever I read about a study comparing electronic and print reading, one of the first questions that comes to mind is, How long have the members of the study population been reading online? Never? A short while? Years? My suspicion is always “a short while.”

Yes, the Internet does have a ton of distractions and it does require a bit self discipline to ignore them. But, if you think about it, it also requires self discipline to read many kinds of print documents that call for deep reading. There, there are potential distractions as well: TV, phone calls, meetings. Of course, you can take it to a place where there are no distractions, but there are ways of doing that with electronic documents as well.

I’ve come up with a few ways to minimize distractions that I use regularly. On a desktop or laptop, I convert the document to PDF format and read it in Adobe Reader, where I can highlight passages of text. It seems that the process of highlighting helps hold my attention, focus my mind, and improve my retention -- the same way it does with print. I also convert documents to .mobi format with Calibre and use Amazon’s Send to Kindle app to send it to my Kindle e-book reader (which I just wore out from use), or to a tablet, where I read it with the Kindle reading app. In both cases, I am able to highlight text and look up non-technical words in the integrated dictionaries. However, by being offline, I lose access to Wikipedia and other references I find quite useful.

As with everything else, there are tradeoffs.