Following Roba: What happens when a low-educated adult immigrant learns to read

Abstract

This longitudinal study follows concurrent changes in a multilingual adult English learner's mastery of alphabetic print literacy and his oral learner language. The learner was 29 years old, and began to read and write an alphabetic script for the first time in English, his seventh language, during this study. Systematic observations were made of both his development of specific literacy skills and specific structures in his oral English over the course of six months during one-to-one literacy tutoring sessions with the first author; these occurred one to two times each week. Mixed methods were used for collection of data, including learner observations, oral language tasks, interviews and review of relevant documents. Results document the learner's development of a set of specific literacy skills during the six-month study. Findings include: knowing the names of the letters of the alphabet seemed unrelated to his decoding ability; some syntactic elements of his oral production became more complex with increasing alphabetic literacy, while oral fluency, lexis and pragmatics did not appear to be related to development of alphabetic literacy.