Illiteracy has a direct negative effect on the quality of life through: lower wages lost opportunities lost access to fundamental information regarding nutrition health safety

Literacy, on the other hand, is critical to keeping pace with the daily discoveries and insights of the information age, for the common good and for personal growth (Teaching Reading Sourcebook. Consortium on Reading Excellence or CORE).

Dr. Joseph Torgesen, a research professor at Florida State University, wrote an article for the Bridges to Practice newsletter Practitioners' Points entitled "What Science Has Taught Us About the Skills Needed to be a Good Reader." Click on the file folder below to open and print the article for your resource folder.

What Science Has Taught Us article

Dr. Torgesen notes that it is not an easy task to help adults acquire useful, functional reading skills because of their limited time, impatience with their own learning, and lack of energy after coping with complex lives. Perhaps they ask too much of themselves. Children, on the average, take three or four years of instruction and practice in reading to become skillful enough to begin reading for enjoyment and learning. Fortunately, adults usually do not start from zero, so your job as teacher is to start where they are, and give them a boost to the next level.

Disclaimer: While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of this web-based training component, it is not an official publication of the Florida Department of Education.