Instruction often treats literacy as a lesson: a set of skills the learner lacks, delivered in pieces to be accumulated and applied in some unnamed way. Literacy exists in the curriculum and the learner comes to receive it. Progress means moving through the pieces.
This guidebook works from a different starting point. Literacy isn't something a learner lacks and a program supplies. It's something people are already doing: filling out a form to receive benefits, following instructions at work, texting their family or telling their own story. Adults enter programs already doing literacy, some of it fluent and some of it effortful.
This isn’t a new idea. It follows a long line of thinking about literacy as social practice — developed by Barton, Gee, Hamilton, Ivanič, Street and others — that treats reading and writing not as a single portable skill but as something people do differently in different parts of their lives. It also integrates elements of genre pedagogy, the Australian approach adapted for adult English language learners by Feez and de Silva Joyce, which shows how different kinds of texts are structured to serve their social purposes. This guidebook takes genre pedagogy further, placing texts within the practices where they carry real consequences and shape who people can be. Those purposeful practices are organized into seven types for teaching and learning.
The guidebook won't just help you make some adjustments and enhancements to your teaching, it also changes what counts as progress, what a goal is and what an outcome is. The skills still matter, but they develop in the doing, in service of something the learner is actually trying to accomplish. Once you see literacy as purposeful doing rather than delivered content, the practice types, the planning, the way skills are handled — all of it makes sense as a whole.
Adult learners come to literacy programs with different histories, different goals and different relationships to reading and writing. Some are preparing for a test. Some are trying to navigate a system. Some want to read to their grandchildren. Some have something to say and need the words to say it.
The practice types in this guidebook are a way of naming that variety. They're organized by one thing: what a learner is trying to do with literacy. They aren't describing the skills used, but the purpose the practice serves — and the social world that purpose belongs to. Every practice is anchored somewhere real: a testing system, a government office, a workplace, a family, a community of readers and writers. Each has its own texts, its own conventions, its own sense of what counts as doing well. Preparing for a credential test, filling out a government form, following instructions, reading in an occupation, telling your own story, writing to create — each is a different practice not because it uses different skills, but because it does different work in a different corner of people's lives.
One of the seven practice types, reporting, works differently. It isn't something a learner sets out to do but something the program is required to document, and it's included because it shapes so much of what happens in a literacy setting.
The seven practices are an organizing framework for teaching and learning in adult literacy and language programs. They aren't exhaustive. There are other ways to map the landscape. They also aren't aspirational or theoretical, but grounded in what educators actually encounter and useful for making deliberate choices about instruction. However, this isn't a curriculum. There are no sequences to follow, no content to cover and no outcomes to march learners toward. It's a way of seeing the practices already at work in your teaching, and the ones that aren't yet. Whether you work in adult literacy, high school equivalency, language instruction or a program that blends all three, you'll find something here that reflects your context.
Reading and writing that has an emotional and cultural connection to the learner's own voice and experience — poetry, storytelling, plays, spoken word and song. The text belongs to the writer, not to a system or a field. This practice builds literacy from the inside out: through expression, reflection and the connection with others who share similar experineces or want to expand their perspectives. For many adult learners it is the most powerful entry point into literacy, and the most consistently undervalued.
The literacy conventions of specific fields — in work (healthcare, trades, service) and in study (history, science, law). Common terms like customer service or scientific method carry specific meanings, ways of thinking and acting that have to be learned.
Navigating the literacy demands of systems — government forms, medical paperwork, legal documents, tenancy agreements, benefit applications. The texts are real, the consequences are real, and most were not written with the reader in mind. Civic participation extends this further: understanding rights, following public information, engaging with community life. Adult learners encounter these texts constantly, often under pressure and without support.
Reading, discussing and reacting to extended narrative texts — novels, short stories, graphic novels, biography, true crime, etc. The focus is on sustained engagement, not information extraction. Adult learners build fluency, explore different worlds and, perhaps most importantly, begin to see themselves as readers. Choice matters: what a learner picks up and wants to finish tells you something no assessment can.
Reading to do something — recipes, manuals, how-to guides, safety instructions, medication directions, assembly steps. The text is a means to an action, not an end in itself. Sequence matters, precision matters, and knowing when to stop and re-read matters. These texts are everywhere in adult learners' daily lives.
Literacy instruction shaped by the reporting requirements of program funding — where the primary purpose is to demonstrate learner activity and progress to funders rather than to serve learner goals directly. Tasks are generic, simplified and designed to be measurable and reportable. There are no meaningful consequences for the learner — the consequences fall on the program. Most educators run this stream alongside genuine teaching. It is named here not because it serves learners well but because it is a real and significant part of what most funded programs do. Naming it honestly is the first step toward making deliberate choices about how much space it takes up.
Literacy organized around a valued credential — passing a driving test, earning a high school equivalency, gaining a certification or license. The test is real, the timeline is the learner's, and the stakes belong to them. Reading and writing are purposeful and focused: study guides, practise tests, application forms. This is not the same as a program's reporting requirements — the difference is who the outcome serves.
Think about what you already do when responding to specific requests from learners such as completing a form, preparing for a test, helping them communicate with their child's teacher, and so on. Which practice-type do these requests align with? How many practice types do you already support?
