National Adult Literacy Database

By Tom Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education

Many adults who are native English language speakers still lack sufficient oracy and literacy skills for school learning, technical training, college and successful career progression. Though considerable attention has been given to the role of literacy in these life roles, less attention has been given to oracy skills.

Because of the critical role that oracy skills play in the acquisition of language, literacy and knowledge in all aspects of life, efforts are needed to develop more effective and efficient methods to help children and adults impart and construct knowledge using the spoken language, i.e., oracy.

The Oracy Workshop will save busy educators and trainers the time of doing extensive research in libraries and online, reading and synthesizing hundreds of books, journals and technical reports, and culling through numerous specifications of standards and progressions for listening and speaking in educational programs.

It will provide a one-day, comprehensive overview of a large amount of research and practice that has been demonstrated to increase the ability of children and adults to communicate and learn more effectively by oracy, to improve their literacy via oracy, and to learn and perform in education, job training and on the job more effectively using improved oracy skills. While focused on the native English speaker, the information may also be of interest to those teaching English for speakers of other languages (ESOL).

The Oracy Workshop is under development. It will generally start at 9 a.m. and conclude at 3 p.m., with a 15-minute break in the morning, another in the afternoon, and a half hour lunch break. The schedule is flexible and can be changed to meet the needs of sponsors. This free workshop will be available in the fall of 2010 through the academic year of 2010-2011. It will provide numerous references to resources available online for teachers and researchers.

Following is a working outline of The Oracy Workshop content at the present time. However, this may change somewhat during the development phase in the next few months.

Title: The Oracy Workshop

Introduction and overview: Improving the Oracy (listening and speaking) Skills of Children and Adults who are English language speakers

Part 1: Introduction:
The importance of different types (registers) of oracy at home, school, work, and in the community in English-speaking industrialized nations.

Part 2: A developmental model of oracy and literacy:
Basic Adaptive Processes: memory, attention, cognition, languaging
Productive Oracy: motor movement, uttering, speaking
Receptive Oracy: hearing, listening, auding
Productive Literacy: motor movement, marking, writing
Receptive Literacy: seeing, looking, reading

Part 3: Oracy in adult literacy education:
Assessing oracy and literacy abilities
Improving literacy by improving oracy, and Improving oracy by improving literacy

Part 4: Oracy in family literacy programs:
Intergenerational transfer of cognitive and non-cognitive abilities via oracy from parents to children (and children to parents in some cases)

Part 5: Oracy in the pre-K-12-College schools
Learning by listening, and teaching by speaking (telling, explaining, lecturing)

Part 6: Oracy in workplaces
Oracy and literacy use by English speakers on-the-job and relationships to job performance

There is no fee for the workshop but sponsors must pay travel and accommodation expenses for the facilitator. For information on how to sponsor The Oracy Workshop in your area, contact Tom Sticht at tsticht@aznet.net.

-30-