ABSTRACT
For more than two decades, worldwide efforts at eradicating adult illiteracy have been deeply influenced by and increasingly extended under the rubric of functional literacy. A climate now exists, at least in Anglophone societies, in which most literacy programs and organizers are nominally committed to functional literacy as the appropriate objective of instruction, independent of the materials and the teaching arrangements in local operation. As a result of its successful expansion, functional literacy no longer refers to a distinctive perspective or practice. The term is now used to justify everything and anything connected with basic skills education for adults.
