Attendants of Adult Literacy Programs in Germany -
Reaching Functional Illiterates
Introduction
Alphabetisation and literacy programs have gained importance in the last decades. The last PIAAC study exploring adult skills in OECD Countries showed that there are relatively high numbers of people with only the most basic level of literacy or below. Germany also has a high number of illiterates (Grotlüschen & Riekmann, 2012, Rosenbladt & Bilger, 2011, Schneider & Ernst, 2009) and below average performance of literacy (OECD, 2013). As this phenomenon has been present for some time there are many traditional literacy courses as well as anonymous online learning platforms. Nevertheless these courses are only attended by one percent of the illiterates in Germany (Schneider & Ernst, 2009). In the following I want to answer the question of why the literacy courses in Germany reach only so few people. Thus, I am going to describe the term of illiteracy before investigating the course attendants and their different biographical data. Also, I will discuss possible reasons for course termination.
Background
When talking about illiteracy there is a distinction between functional and primary illiterate, with the latter being persons that have absolutely no skills of reading and writing in any language and the former having possibly received some years of basic education but currently no more than the most basic writing and reading skills (OECD, 2013, Grotlüschen & Riekmann 2012). This may lead to devastating limitations of everyday life and professional life as well as dependence on others or isolating aspects. In this paper I will only refer to functional illiterates. There are 4.4 million functional illiterates with German as their first...
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Sparks, B. &. Butterwick, S.(2004). Culture, Equity and Learning. In G. Foley, Dimensions of Adult Learning (p. 276-289). McGraw-Hill Education.
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White, S, and S Dillow. Key Concepts and Features of the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy. Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 2005.
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be found in the English dictionary accompanied with a definition, but letters are used to form acronyms that a...
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