The Acquisition of Literacy by Children and Adults.

A developmental model of literacy based on language and cognitive skills is presented in this paper. Two independent learning strands suggested as major factors in achieving literacy are learning to understand language by eye (reading) as skillfully as one can understand language by ear (auding) and learning to use the printed medium for literacy task performance in understanding various graphic displays using iconic, linguistic, and schematic representations. Examples of advanced information processing skills involved in the latter are presented and explained. A study designed to assess discrepancies between auding and reading skills of adults in a literacy training program used the Durrell Listening Reading Test and obtained auding scores for the adults of only the fifth-grade level. In a second study, it was observed that adults who scored at the eighth-grade level on a standardized reading test may be less developed than a group of average fifth-grade readers in automaticity of decoding. This and other studies surveyed suggest that learning to understand language by eye as skillfully as by ear may take several years after the initial decoding has been mastered. (MKM)