J. RÜSSELER ET AL.
Copyright © 2012 SciRe s . 361
employers. The participation in this course of eight months
duration resulted in an improvement in reading and writing
skills of the attending adults. Spelling accuracy as well as read-
ing speed and accuracy improved significantly. In contrast,
functional illiterates participating in traditional adult education
courses that take place once or twice a week and use various
teaching methods did not show reliable improvements in read-
ing or writing. Thus, we conclude that the program “Alpha
Plus” is an effective training program for teaching reading and
writing competencies to func tionally illiterate adults.
We observed several important changes of participants’ atti-
tudes toward their reading and writing problems during the
training. At the beginning, all participants were reluctant to talk
to other people about the nature of the course they were attend-
ing. The experience that other adults have similar problems
with reading and writing and that it is possible to do something
to overcome these problems has, throughout the course, lead to
a more active handling of the problem. For example, the par-
ticipants took part in the “open day” of the BNW (about five
months after the course). They made a poster on which most of
them were pictured and listed by name. They desired to inform
other functional illiterates about the opportunities that are
opened up by attending a reading and writing training course in
adulthood.
Prior to and at the end of the course, participants took part in
a medical examination. For all participants, weight loss was
observed. Health-related issues (such as a healthy diet) were
discussed frequently during the course and on several occasions,
lunch was prepared together. The weight loss might be attrib-
utable thereto.
The present study has several shortcomings. First, we did not
include a control group that received the same amount of train-
ing as the training group. This was done mainly for reasons of
practicability. However, we included a control group receiving
training that is typical for adult functional illiterates in Ger-
many (at least for those few who receive some kind of training).
Second, the design of the present study does not allow conclu-
sions with respect to the contribution of the single modules to
the overall success of the training. The training of basic per-
ceptual abilities and the “Lateraltrainer” have been shown to be
effective in the training of reading to children with dyslexia
(Tewes, Steffen, & Warnke, 2003). To date, we have no infor-
mation about the effectiveness of the other single modules that
were included in the current program. Further research is re-
quired to investigate which of the employed training methods
are essenti al for the training su ccess.
Acknowledgements
The research reported herein was supported by a grant from
the German Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesmin-
isterium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF) assigned to JR
(grant no. 01AB074401). The opinions that may be stated in
this paper are those of the authors.
The authors declare that they have no personal financial in-
terest in the developed training program.
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