The Future of Literacy in a Changing World, Revised Edition

This volume came out of the seminal international conference entitled "The Future of Literacy in a Changing World," held at the University of Pennsylvania in May 1985. It was the inaugural conference of the research center at Penn which is now called jointly the International Literacy Institute and the National Center on Adult Literacy. That conference brought together a diverse array of academics and policymakers to take a new look at the past, present and future of literacy at what might be considered a turning point in the field. The field had begun to show inputs from researchers in allied fields of psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and the like. And leaders in the reading field (such as John Downing, to whose memory the first edition was dedicated) were also beginning to realize that the challenges of literacy were much more complex than simply producing more and better textbooks. This series attempts to break down the walls that partition literacy into separate intellectual territories. In this series we try to find interconnections not only among the three major segments of literacy specialists as denoted in the series subtitle, but also across the life span (children and adults) and across ethnic, linguistic and cultural groups. This series will provide an opportunity to make connections across various knowledge bases and expand the possibilities not only to achieve a better understanding of literacy in the past, present and future, but also to lead to a future which is a more literate place to live.