Bilingual literacy learning in adult education

Abstract

Community-based literacy teaching workshops attend to the learning needs of new students who have not been able to benefit from enrollment as children in the public school system. The following report from the field calls attention to the special circumstances of this heterogeneous group of literacy learners. The workshop described here engages learners who are literacy learners as well as second language learners of the national language, in this case Spanish. Literacy learning proceeds in parallel with second language learning. The report summarizes a series of informal interviews with students and their teacher and observation of their adult literacy program, during a period of approximately ten years. As such it provides preliminary findings for better understanding the problems of community literacy programs in bilingual communities in general. The tasks of learning to read and write present themselves in a special situation of language contact, that of community language and national language.