ABSTRACT
The focus of the What Works Study is on adult English as a Second Language (ESL) literacy students⎯ESL learners who lack basic literacy skills and have minimal profi ciency in English. These learners face the dual challenge of developing basic skills, decoding, comprehending, and producing print. Until the last quarter century, schools and resettlement agencies designed ESL classes on the assumption that adult students had the basic education and literacy skills to learn another language (Van de Craats, Kurvers, & Young-Scholten, 2006). A wave of immigrants that arrived beginning in the late 1970s challenged this assumption, as these new immigrants did not have the strong educational experiences upon which literacy is built. Without the basic text-processing skills that allow them to follow text that appeared in class and in textbooks, these students became frustrated, overwhelmed, and had a high dropout rate due to their inability to catch up the missing literacy skills and keep up with the more literate students in the class (Wrigley & Guth, 1992). Recent trends indicate that the number of new immigrants to the United States who have very low levels of literacy is continuing to increase (Fix, Passel, & Sucher, 2003).
