Adult Literacy in Australia: Reading Beyond the Figures.

Castleton, Geraldine

It has become commonplace for the education field in Australia to be presented with concerns, even indignation, about literacy levels among children at various stages of compulsory schooling. In more recent times these concerns have spread to include disquiet over the literacy levels of some adult Australians located in the workforce, the labour market and in the wider community.

Adult literacy, the term used to describe that sector of literacy provision designed specifically for adults, is a relatively new field of educational endeavour. Concerns about levels of literacy among the adult populations of western nations did not really emerge until the 1970s largely because of these nations' as yet, unquestioned faith in their compulsory, mass-education systems. It had been common practice for some time in developed nations to equate levels of literacy within the national population to years of schooling. From this premise it followed that, because these nations had a history of compulsory mass schooling going back a number of generations, they enjoyed high levels of literacy. The notion that there were non-literates in such a literate world was therefore hard to accept. A clear indication of this non-acceptance is evidenced in the fate of the Duncan Report on Adult Education, produced in Australia in 1944. This report, revealing the extent of literacy difficulties among military personnel, and recommending that measures taken by the then Army Education Service to overcome illiteracy among soldiers be extended to the wider population, was not made public until the late 1970s because its conclusions seemed so unlikely (Wickert & Zimmerman, 1991, p. 182). Since the 1970s, however, the adult literacy movement has developed rapidly in Australia, growing from modest, volunteer-dependent provision within small, community-based groups and organisations, to its current positioning within wider, national vocational education and training agendas.

Constructing adult literacy as a problem

The growing awareness of, and anxiety about, levels of literacy among adults, and official responses to that concern that have developed in Australia and elsewhere since the 1970s, cannot be directly related to any real changes in the actual situation. There is no reason to believe that levels of literacy among adults have declined markedly in recent times. Rather, the increased recent concern, and framing of adult illiteracy as a `problem', can be explained as evidence of how the history of literacy is always locally and situatedly contingent on wider societal events. Reports of literacy crises have become a regular feature of modern-day living, usually abating somewhat after a flurry of activity in the popular media. In discussing various explanations that can be given for `literacy crises', and thereby unearthing the fundamentally ideological work that can be ascribed to different notions of literacy by and within nations, Welch and Freebody (1993, p. 14) have suggested that such crises can be understood in terms of an `invented' phenomenon. From this perspective, the discourse of a literacy crisis is then interpreted within wider societal economic and political concerns. The pervasive and long-term effect of the pronouncements of literacy crises is the manner in which ensuing debates over literacy and literacy standards become contests of moral and social vision about what defines the ideal literate student and citizen (Green et al, 1997).

Appearing as it did in countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada in the early 1980s (Street, 1984; de Castell & Luke, 1986; Graff, 1987; Draper, 1989; Gowen, 1992; Freebody & Welch, 1993; Hull, 1993; Green et al., 1997) and in the late 1980s in Australia (Freebody & Welch, 1993, Castleton, 1997; Green et al., 1997), the latest discourse of literacy crisis among adults has been constructed in a world in the process of dramatic economic, social and political change. Since the 1980s, all aspects of our lives have been marked and changed by a new globalised economy and the increased international competitiveness that has resulted from this. Australia has not fared well in this new global economy, due, in part, to its historic over-reliance on primary commodities that no longer provide any status and distinctiveness in the international marketplace. However, similar to the experiences in other western nations, much of the responsibility for Australia's difficulty in competing at an international level has been located with traditional, out-dated forms of production and skills deficit in the Australian workforce.

Over the last two decades, a number of official government reports and policy documents, that formed what Bartlett and colleagues (1991) have called a mandate of `corporate federalism', set out a clear agenda for reform in Australian industry, education and training sectors (e.g. Australia Reconstructed (1987); Skills for Australia (1987, 1988); Training Costs of Award Restructuring (1990); TAFE in the 1990s: Developing Australia's Skills, (1991); Words at Work: A Report on Literacy Needs in the Workplace (1991); Australia's Language: The Australian Language and Literacy Policy (1991); One Nation (1992); Employment Related Key Competencies for Post Compulsory Education and Training, (Carmichael Report), (1992); The Australian Vocational Certificate Training Scheme, (1992); Working Nation, (1994); Towards a Skilled Australia, (1994); A Bridge to the Future (1998)). The government's agenda has been to bring about significant changes in Australian industries, making them globally more competitive, as well as reforming vocational education and training policy to improve the quality and flexibility of existing systems so that Australia would have a better skilled and adaptable workforce.

Dominant public discourses of literacy

Within these reports, many of which fit Darrah's (1992) description of `future workplace skills literature', literacy has become constructed as a functional, employment skill closely tied to the nation's economic progress and productivity, and it is from this perspective that government responses to literacy levels among adults is best understood. Official concerns about the literacy skills of adults first came to light in Australia in 1990, the International Literacy Year. One of the projects funded by the federal government as part of its commitment to the international focus on literacy, was a survey of the status of literacy among our adult population.

The results of this survey were widely reported in the media, with claims that between 10% and 20% of the adult population (Words at Work, 1991, p. 17) were not functionally literate appearing as a regular news item. For many, one of the alarming findings of this particular study was that, while poor literacy skills had long been associated with certain migrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds, there was also evidence that a significant number of native English speakers also experienced varying degrees of difficulty (Wickert, 1989). What was rarely reported in the media, however, was the significance of the title of the research report, No Single Measure, a name deliberately chosen by the author to capture the ideologically complex process of separating out the population into the `literate' and the `not literate'.

Recent Australian Bureau of Statistics findings on adult literacy in Australia

In recent times the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) conducted a more extensive survey of adult literacy in Australia as part of its 1996 census. This exercise, involving over 9000 participants across all Australian states and territories, again collected a range of information from participants before measuring their performance over the three types of prose, document and quantitative literacy, and against five levels of skill, with Level 1 being the lowest level. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Survey of Adult Literacy (SAL)

 did not define literacy in terms of a basic threshold, above which someone
 is `literate' and below which someone is `illiterate'. Rather it defined
 literacy as a continuum for each of the three types of literacy ...
 Progression along this continuum was characterised by increased ability to
 `process' information (for example to locate, integrate, match and generate
 information) and to draw correct inferences based on the information being
 used (ABS, 1997, p. x).

While scores on the literacy continuum for each of the three types of literacy were divided into five levels, the ABS notes that `because the tasks used to derive literacy ability vary in difficulty, there is a range of abilities even among people within each level' (ABS, 1997, p. x). The `task-based' methodology used by the ABS to derive skill levels was developed and tested for the International Adult Literacy Survey by Statistics Canada and the Educational Testing Service in the United States, and the methodology has been shown to be valid for producing population estimates of literacy and numeracy abilities and to be a stable measurement tool across different countries. The methodology was extensively pilot-tested in Australia and an independent evaluation of the results of one of the pilot tests was conducted by a panel of Australian experts in the fields of language and literacy. Australia became one of twenty-six countries that participated in the International Adult Literacy Survey, coordinated by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and conducted over a four-year period. This participation has therefore enabled international comparisons of various aspects of literacy measured by the International Adult Literacy Survey (ABS, 1997, pp. xii - xiii).

The three aspects of literacy involved in the survey were:

Prose literacy ability to understand and use prose texts,
 e.g. newspapers, magazines, brochures.

Document literacy ability to locate and use information in
 documents,
 e.g. tables, schedules, charts, maps.

Quantitative literacy ability to perform arithmetic operations
 using numbers embedded in printed text or
 documents; different from numeracy.

(ABS, 1997)
A short description of the lowest and highest levels is as follows:

Level 1 very poor skills;
 could be expected to have serious difficulties with much
 printed material;
 can perform only simple tasks.

Level 5 very good skills;
 can make high level inferences;
 use complex displays of information;
 can perform several operations sequentially.

(ABS, 1997)

Some of the findings of the Survey of Aspects of Literacy, released in 1997 by the ABS on September 8, International Literacy Day are:

* almost half of Australians aged 15-74 (6.2 million) have `poor' or `very poor' prose literacy skills;

* another 35% (4.7 million) could be expected to cope with many of the demands of daily life but not always at a high level of proficiency;

* some 17% (2.3 million) could be considered to have prose literacy skills of a high order.

Similar results were also reported for document literacy and quantitative literacy.

Further findings showed:

* almost half the people who first spoke a language other than English are at Level 1 (1.1 million);

* 14% of native speakers are at Level 1 (1.5 million);

* 30% of unemployed people have Level 1 skills, 12% of employed people have Level 1 skills;

* more than half a million people often need help with reading information from government agencies, businesses etc, and just less than half a million often need help filling out forms. Almost all of these people (88%) have Level 1 skills.

(ABS, 1997)

The Australian Bureau of Statistics also noted that Australia's overall literacy skill profile is generally comparable with that of several other developed countries, though noticeably lower than that achieved by Swedish citizens.

Responding to the figures

So what can be made of these figures? How should we react to them? Margaret Meek (1991, p. 3) has written that `to be at home in a literate society is a feeling as well as a fact'. Apart from any other meaning that can be drawn from the `facts' of the SAL, one reading may tell us that there may be many Australians who do not feel `at home' in their own country, and could be denied the opportunities that many Australian citizens take for granted. There is no doubt that in a print-dependent society such as ours, regardless of the advances of technology, people who do not have a reasonable facility with the dominant, English language can not only be disadvantaged, but perhaps even exploited. Should we be appalled that such a situation exists in what we believe to be a sophisticated, western nation? Rather than be horrified, and immediately try to locate blame for such a state of affairs, either with individuals or with systems, or even government, as is often the case when figures, such as these are released, there is much that can, and needs to, be done.

Firstly, it is important to recognise that there are some limitations associated with the data: the survey did not involve any writing tasks, for example, its emphasis was on information processing by means of reading rather than writing. Furthermore, the survey deals only with English, and a particular view of English at that. As the tasks were developed by Statistics Canada, drawing from countries that had participated in the survey prior to Australia's involvement, the Australian Council for Adult Literacy (ACAL) rightly points out that `the characterisation of some of the everyday tasks may not be consistent with the kinds of ways that these things are understood in Australia (ACAL View, http://www. acal.edu.au/acalview.html, January 1999)'. ACAL uses as an example the point that many of the graphical representations used in the survey were in forms not in common use in Australia at the time. According to Levine (1998), the consequence of this is that the definition of literacy adopted in the survey was not the one that became operationalised through the items selected. The ACAL View developed on the issue of surveys and their uses discusses other limitations of this, and similar surveys, but concludes that they may also contain useful information when their results are interpreted cautiously (ACAL View, http://www.acal.edu.au/ acalview.html, January 1999).

The figures can form the basis for action as they clearly demonstrate there is cause for concern, both for individuals who struggle with reading and writing tasks, and for a nation that it not tapping into the potential of many of its citizens. Governments at all levels can be lobbied to ensure suitable responses are made to such figures. Literacy is an essential key to effective life-long learning, and every individual has the fundamental right to pursue learning, either formally or informally, throughout their lives. Therefore it is a responsibility of governments to supply the necessary services and provision for this to happen.

The Federal Government has already responded to some of the outcomes of this survey. The SAL results showed that, while younger people (i.e. under the age of 45) tended to have higher levels of literacy than older people (i.e. between the ages of 65 to 74), the age group of 15 to 19 year olds did not fare so well. When this information is coupled with the finding of a clear relationship between literacy skill level and labour force status, and Australia's high unemployment levels among young people, some disturbing conclusions may be drawn: many young job seekers may have low levels of literacy. The Federal Government's recent funding of literacy and numeracy training for 18-24 year-old job seekers is a direct consequence of the ABS figures. Certainly one of the many uses of the findings of exercises such as the SAL can be the informing of government policy. However, while this kind of government response to the issue may be applauded, it does reflect an `economic rationalist' agenda in which literacy is framed only as a functional, employment-related skill. Furthermore, the Prime Minister's announcement on 28 January (ABC Television News) that dole payments would be cut to young people with literacy and numeracy needs who did not attend training, serves to illustrate the narrow, functional, and `deficit' view of literacy that currently informs policy and presents people with literacy needs in a particularly negative, damaging way, perhaps further alienating them from society and forcing them to feel less `at home' in a nation that does not seem particularly concerned with their well-being.

Alternative discourses on literacy

The cries of outrage from various welfare organisations, professional associations representing the interests of adult literacy, academics and politicians from the Government Opposition that met this announcement signify the need to broaden the debate around literacy to involve different perspectives that may be more useful in framing appropriate responses to the needs of adults with limited literacy skills. Morphet (1996), in describing the outcomes of various studies into the social uses of literacy in South Africa, would contend that a more appropriate way forward lies in framing the debate around questions such as, `What do people want to be literate for?' and `What are the literacy practices in which people want to engage?' (Morphet in Prinsloo & Breier, 1996, p. 257). These kinds of questions remind us of the difficulty many people may have coping with the information processing demands of life, and of our responsibility to ensure that these people are not excluded from the goods and services they require. The sad reality of adult literacy is that the people most in need of assistance are also those at greatest risk of being caught up in political negotiation and grandstanding, as evidenced in the recent literacy/dole debate. Such moves reflect the ways in which debates around literacy become contests of social visions and ideologies--used to promote different versions of appropriate behaviour, and different visions of the ideal literacy student and citizen (Green et al, 1997, p. 10).

Alternative ways of reading the figures may also highlight a more useful, and fundamentally more accurate, way of framing literacy, or literacies, as shared social practice. It would help to demonstrate the ways in which literacy is used by people as they interact within rich social networks characterised by the mutual exchange of skills. Studies conducted within various communities around the world, including the work of Brice Heath (1983), Fingeret (1992) and Gowen (1992) in the United States, Street (1984) in Iran, Barton and Ivanic (1991) and Barton and Hamilton (1998) in Britain, Prinsloo and Breier in South Africa (1996) and Castleton (1997) in Australia, all highlight how people typically rely on each other as they go about not only doing their jobs but the many tasks that make up their daily lives. This collaborative process is a fundamental-part of social life and, rather than be ignored, must be accommodated in contemporary understandings of literacy and of literacy education. The current, popular framing of literacy as skill, evident in the representations in the media and government policy, places far too much emphasis on individual competence and not enough on the essentially social, context-embedded nature of literacy. Neither does this focus allow for proper discussion on which particular literacy practices are important in people's lives. Homeless people, for example, who experience the labour market realities of limited employment prospects, may be more interested in those literacy practices that enable them to access better housing opportunities or to take greater responsibility over their own health than in developing those literacy practices deemed essential for the workplace (Castleton, 1998).

A particularly damaging effect of the `literacy as functional skill' approach that currently underpins much of the contemporary debates around literacy is the way in which it enables the population to be divided into the `literate' or `skilled' and the `illiterate' and `non-skilled'. Castleton's (1997) study of workplace literacy in the Australian context found, for example, that people representing industry frequently talked of workers as either `skilled' or `unskilled' on the basis of their perceived levels of literacy skill. This kind of binary assessment is happening despite cautions from the authors of surveys such as the SAL that separating the population in this way is not such a simple exercise. The fact that this kind of work is done with findings such as those emerging from the SAL highlights a point made by Graft (1987, p. 24) that the history of literacy has been plagued by the `tyranny of conceptual dichotomies' (i.e. literate v illiterate) and Collins' (1991, p. 231) contention that `the definition of what is and what is not literacy is never a purely technical but always also a profoundly political matter'.

Literacy education as hegemonic practice

This point raises what may be argued as a further significant issue arising from the SAL findings: the extent to which education, and literacy education in particular, continues to fulfil a hegemonic role within our society. Collins (1991) would argue that, with the introduction of compulsory, mass education during the nineteenth century, schools became the sites for the socialising of populations for the class-divided industrialised societies, with literacy ideologically cast as integral to the modern state's means of governance (Rockhill, 1993). Donald (1991, p. 212), has also claimed that the formation and maintenance of the ruling class, the management of relations between ruling groups and `national popular masses' and the constant reviewing and reconstructing of cultural hegemony have become the cornerstones of the history of literacy. This view has been supported more recently by Lankshear (1998) who has written that recent educational reform proposals, that include various strategies for dealing with a perceived decline in literacy standards, need to be understood for what they are: `no more (or less) than an elaborate strategy for maintaining hierarchies, shoring up particular interests, and reproducing patterns of advantage and disadvantage' (Lankshear, 1998, p. 372).

It may be argued that literacy, tied to a standard dialect and promulgated through deliberately selective literacy practices in schools, is a good thing, permitting, in principle, the wider transmission of messages and the widest communicability (O'Neal in Collins, 1991, p. 234). However, this argument also becomes a means of establishing certain identities and principles for constructing particular communities so that it purportedly enables clear distinctions to be made between the literate and sub-literate, low-literate or illiterate (Street, 1995, p. 106). Street (1995, p. 106) has described the outcomes of such practices as marginalising alternatives, while Gee (1990) has expressed similar reservations about some current literacy pedagogy, arguing that literacy learning does not take place without the accompanying acquisition of a discourse, with some discourses carrying more cultural capital than others.

According to Green and colleagues, literacy education has always been about

 difference and power, about teaching members of communities and nations to
 `be' different kinds of literate citizens, with stratified access to social
 institutions. Rather than literacy education being a common cultural
 experience, the different kinds of literacies provided for communities of
 learners tend to reflect, rather than erase, Australian social class
 difference and cultural diversity (Green, 1997, p. 12).

Green and his associates would argue that the marginalisation of alternative ways of demonstrating `being literate' referred to by Street (1995) has been a feature of Australian education, perhaps making it difficult for some children to feel `at home' in their classrooms, and even excluding them from certain opportunities and outcomes.

Problematising discourses of schooled literacy

There is a growing amount of evidence emerging from the work of many literacy researchers who now include in their ranks linguists, socio-linguists, anthropologists and critical social theorists, that suggest it is time to put what Cook-Gumperz (1986) has called `schooled literacy' up for scrutiny. Over time, ways of doing literacy at school have become valorised, disguising the extent to which they have also become routinised and embedded in a specific, isolated, institutional context whose function is to impart `skills' in reading and writing abstracted from contexts of use. For Meek (1991, p. 126), what has become obscured in the ascendancy of `schooled literacy' is an important truth of a history of literacy, namely that `little of the world's literate behaviour, had, until recently, been part of schooled literacy'. As a consequence of this work, many of the different literacy practices, or literacies, found in the community, home and workplaces, have become marginalised and defined as less than satisfactory against the standard set within the school. Furthermore, children who are unable to participate in these school literacy practices have become marginalised, and defined as `deficient', attesting to the fact that there have always been children who have not felt `at home' in school, or at least have not been as comfortable within the parameters of what the system has defined as `normal'.

What becomes an additional concern is the extent to which these same standards are now being used to make distinctions between people in contexts beyond school, including the workplace. Schultz's (1997, p. 51) critique of workplace education programs in the United States, for example, determined that instead of, or in addition to, the schooling system deciding if certain workers can be characterised as `literate' or `illiterate', employers and others working on their behalf were now setting the standards by which some people are pronounced `illiterate', as well as defining the contexts and skills that determine what it means to `become literate'. Castleton's (1997) analysis of policy and practice of workplace literacy in the Australian context found that traditional notions of `schooled literacy' have been drawn upon by policy makers, bureaucrats, industry and literacy providers to define what it means to be literate at work, while workers with poor literacy skills are held responsible for this nation's poor performance in the global marketplace (Castleton, 1997; 1999). This is a disturbing finding, particularly for those workers who for many years have been operating in their workplaces with their own forms of communication, including literacy practices. Suddenly such practices, once deemed `to be okay' by management, are now being judged by various means of task analysis, largely informed by notions of `school literacy', to not `be okay' (Castleton, 1997).

Recognising that literacy practices are complexly patterned, like other communicative and social practices, highlights the significance of challenging the notion that there is one monolithic type of literacy, typically the literacy associated with schooling itself. It also highlights the importance of not setting up a false polarity between `social' contexts and `educational' contexts as the literacy classroom is a particular social context, with its own literacy practices (Baynham, 1995, p. 42). Like all contexts, the school has its own social beliefs and behaviours into which particular literacy practices are inserted, and even though educational policy and curricula may claim to be informed by contemporary understandings of literacy as a social practice, they may, in fact, simply be proposing another version of what Street (1984) has called an `autonomous' model of literacy; the view that literacy in itself has consequences, irrespective, or autonomous, of context. Such a view may mean that the particular form being taught in school gets to be treated as the only kind, as some form of universal standard that naturalises and disguises its socially specific features, thereby disguising its real history and ideological origins (Street 1997).

Conclusion

The ABS results clearly show that there are many adult Australians who may need support from the educational and wider community to access educational opportunities so that they can achieve personal and societal goals that others take for granted. There is no doubt that, as a nation, we all benefit from a society in which everyone is given equal opportunity to fully participate in and contribute to every aspect of this nation's life. However, let us not overlook the true nature of literacy as a culturally determined social practice, evolved over time, so that we are not restricted in our perspective by particular versions or constructions of literacy that allow some to be defined as `literate' and others as `different' and `deficient', thereby further underlining, in many instances, their already marginalised status in society. Let us ensure that richer, more meaningful conceptualisations of literacy or literacies, that recognise its use within `communities of practice' and acknowledge the worth of all those involved in such communities, are taken up within the formal education sector and beyond and reflected in pedagogies of literacy accessible and equitable to all students. We must all be active in debates around what forms of literacy education are most appropriate for all our citizens, so that they recognise the `feelings' of those constructed through particular, selective representations of `fact'.

References

ACAL View: Surveys and Beyond: The Case for Adult Literacy, 1999, http:// www.acal.edu.au/acalview.html, 29 January.

Aspects of Literacy: Assessed Skill Levels, Australia 1996, 1997, ABS: Cat No. 4228.0.

Bartlett, L., Knight, J., & Lingard, B. 1991, `Corporate federalism and the reform of teacher education in Australia', Journal of Education Policy, vol. 6, no 1, pp. 91-95.

Barton, D. & Ivanic, R. (eds.) 1991, Writing in the Community, Sage, London.

Barton, D. & Hamilton, M. 1998, Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community, Routledge, London.

Baynham, M. 1995, Literacy Practices: Investigating Literacy in Social Contexts, Longman, London.

Castleton, G. 1997, Workplace literacy: (e)merging discourses at work, PhD thesis, Griffith University.

Castleton, G. 1998, `Examining the accounts of homeless people's needs to determine a role for language, literacy and numeracy training', Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the Australian Council for Adult Literacy. Adelaide, September. pp. 69-77.

Castleton, G. 1999, Understanding Work and Literacy: (E)merging Discourses at Work, Research into Practice Monograph Series, Language Australia, Melbourne.

Collins, J. 1991, `Hegemonic practice: Literacy and standard language in public education', in Rewriting Literacy: Culture and the Discourse of the Other, eds. C. Mitchell, & K. Weiler, Bergin & Garvey, New York.

Cook-Gumperz, J. (ed.) 1986, The Social Construction of Literacy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Darrah, C. 1992, `Workplace skills in context', Human Organization, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 264-273.

deCastell, S. & Luke, A. 1986, `Models of literacy in North American schools,' in Literacy, Society, and Schooling: A Reader, eds. S. DeCastell, A. Luke, & K. Egan Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Donald, J. 1991, `How illiteracy became a problem (and literacy stopped being one), in Rewriting Literacy: Culture and the Discourse of the Other, eds. C. Mitchell, & K. Weiler, Bergin & Garvey, New York.

Draper, J. 1989, `A historical view of literacy', in Adult Literacy Perspectives, eds. M. Taylor, & J. Draper, Culture Concepts, Toronto.

Fingeret, H. 1992, `Literacy in the USA: The present issues', in The Future of Literacy and The Literacy of the Future A Report of the Seminar on Adult Literacy in Industrialized Countries, UNECSO Institute for Education, Hamburg, 4-7 December 1991.

Freebody, P. & Welch, A. (eds.) 1993, Introduction to Knowledge, Culture and Power: International Perspectives on Literacy as Policy and Practice, Falmer Press, London.

Gee, J. 1990, Social Linguistics and Literacies. Ideology in Discourses, Falmer Press, London.

Gowen, S. 1992, The Politics of Workplace Literacy. A Case Study, Columbia College Press, New York.

Graff, H. 1987, The Labyrinths of Literacy. Reflections on Literacy Past and Present, Falmer Press, London.

Green, B., Hodgens, J. & Luke, A. 1997, `Debating literacy in Australia: History lessons and popular f(r)ictions', The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 6-24.

Heath, S.B. 1983, Ways with Words, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Hull, G. 1993, `Hearing other voices: A critical assessment of popular views on literacy and work', Harvard Educational Review, vol. 63, no. 1, pp. 20-49.

Lankshear, C. 1998, `Meanings of literacy in contemporary educational reform proposals', Educational Theory, vol 48, no. 3, pp. 351-372.

Levine, K. 1998, `Definitional and methodological problems in cross-national measurement of adult literacy: The case of the IALS', Written Language and Literacy, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 41-61.

Meek. M. 1991, On Being Literate, Bodley Head, London.

Morphet, T. 1996, `Afterword', in The Social Uses of Literacy: Theory and Practice in Contemporary South Africa, eds. M. Prinsloo, & M. Breier, John Benjamins, Bertsham, SA & Amsterdam.

Prinsloo, M. & Breier, M. 1996, `Introduction', in The Social Uses of Literacy: Theory and Practice in Contemporary South Africa, eds. M. Prinsloo, & M. Breier, John Benjamins, Bertsham, SA & Amsterdam.

Rockhill, K. 1993, `Gender, language and the politics of literacy', in Cross-cultural Approaches to Literacy, ed. B. Street, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Schultz, K. 1997, `Discourses of workplace education: A challenge to the new orthodoxy', in Changing Work, Changing Workers. Critical Perspectives on Language, Literacy and Skills, ed. G. Hull, State University of New York, Albany.

Street, B. 1984, Literacy in Theory and Practice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Street, B. 1995, Social Literacies: Critical Approaches to Literacy in Development, Ethnography and Education, Longman, London.

Street, B. 1997, `The implications of the "New Literacy Studies" for literacy Education', English in Education, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 45-49.

Welch, A. & Freebody, P. 1993, `Explanations of current international literacy crises', in Knowledge, Culture and Power: International Perspectives on Literacy as Policy and Practice, eds. P. Freebody & A. Welch, Falmer Press, London.

Wickert, R. 1989, No Single Measure, AGPS, Canberra.

Wickert, R. & Zimmerman, J. 1991, `Adult basic education in Australia: Questions of integrity', in Adult and Continuing Education in Australia. Issues and Practices, ed. M. Tennant, Routledge, London. Words at Work: Literacy Needs in the Workplace, 1991, AGPS, Canberra.

Geraldine Castleton is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Literacy and Language Education Research, at the Mt Gravatt Campus of Griffith University in Queensland. She was a primary teacher and language adviser before moving into tertiary education. Since 1992 her research interests have been in the area of adult and workplace literacy and she has been both a member and chief investigator of a number of national and state-based research projects and consultancies.

Address: Centre for Literacy and Language Education Research, Mt Gravatt Campus, Griffith University, Brisbane, Qld 4011 Email: G.Castleton@mailbox.gu.edu.au