Who are Literacy (LESLLA) learners

Low Educated Second Language and Literacy Acquisition (LESLLA) for Adults.

The term "LESLLA learners" refers to adult immigrant language learners with little or no schooling in their primary language prior to immigrating. This term was coined by an international organization of teachers and researchers to address the specific needs of programs working with these populations.

Other terms used to refer to these students include:

  • LIFEs (Limited or Interrupted Formal Education)
  • SLIFEs (Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education)

LESLLA learners generally have three years or less of formal schooling; LIFE learners can read with some proficiency, but lack the support and skills acquired in grades three through nine that enable highly proficient readers to be efficient and effective intermediate and advanced language learners.

Adult literacy learners are a very diverse group, but they have two things in common:

  • they are acquiring proficiency in English (or another national language)
  • at the same time, they are developing literacy skills

See this video introduction to LESLLA and LIFE learners

Many LESLLA learners have the following characteristics:

  • Learn through speaking and listening
  • Recognize the meaning of pictures and symbols used in everyday life
  • May possess strong memorization strategies
  • Focus more on meaning in language learning, not form
  • Have interrupted or limited formal schooling
  • May hide low print literacy

LESLLA learners are emergent readers, for whom reading is still slow and somewhat arduous.. LIFEs, on the other hand, may be fluent-if not highly proficient- readers, but they still struggle with comprehension and retention. They may have trouble engaging with and using text in rich and complex ways.

Research on emergent readers (summarized in Vinogradov and Bigelow (2010)) shows that:

Typical emergent reader see written language as an arbitrary representation of spoken language, not as physical representations of people, places, ideas or things. This means they do not initially connect written words to concepts or objects, nor to speech.

Challenges for emergent readers:

  • process oral language differently than ELLs with print literacy skills
  • focus on word-meaning mapping, not on parts of words
  • "hear" oral language differently
  • don’t attend to small changes in sound or phonemes
  • don’t visualize text
  • may not be attending tomorphemes

Strengths adult ELLs bring to the learning process

  • funds of knowledge and strong oral communication skills.
  • strategies that may be atypical of students with primary language education
  • fine-tuned memorization skills, or visualizing of other sorts.
  • the ability to recognize pictures and symbols used in everyday life and understand their meaning

They may

  • find sight words easier to memorize than those with print literacy
  • use pictures to comprehend text that is read to them
  • need help in decoding the relationship between text and images

Their word attack strategies may involve seeing words as pictures rather than individual sounds, at first (Bigelow & Schwarz, 2010).

These word attack strategies are key to initial literacy instruction for adult ELLs who are emergent readers.