FEATURES

A major problem facing instructors in adult basic education (A.B.E.) program is the lack of material designed specifically for the adult learning to read. In order to provide the adult with interesting reading at a suitable ability level, teachers are forced to develop material either as a supplement to the available material or as a replacement.

By preparing their own teaching material instructors can consider their students.:

1. interests and needs
2. reading strengths and weaknesses and
3. background knowledge. They can also ensure that the material is adult in content and format.

The purpose of this paper is to provide some guidelines for the instructors who wish to prepare reading material which is:

ADULT CONTENT

The first step in developing reading material for adults is to determine what is of interest to them. The surest way of doing this is to determine the interests of an individual student and prepare material specifically for that person. However, if the material is to be used with more than one student, a more general approach may be desirable and is possible because adult learners have certain characteristics in common. The adult learner:

Adult students want the material that they are learning to read to be practical and applicable to their lives. While the adult is learning to read he/she also wants to be reading to learn. Brown and Newman, 1968, (1) found that illiterate and literate adults had similar reading interests and that adults learning to read were concerned with: in that order. Therefore in preparing adult reading materials, items on different types of jobs, on health, child care and local events, would seem to be useful.