Reader Profiles for Adults with Low Literacy Skills: A Quest to Find Resilient Readers

Resilient readers are those who, despite their poor phonological decoding skills, have good comprehension abilities (Jackson & Doellinger, 2002). Thus far, these readers have been identified in college settings. The purpose of this study was to a) determine if this reader profile was present in a sample taken from an Adult Basic Education (ABE) population, and b) identify compensatory mechanisms these readers might use to better their reading comprehension. We administered a battery of tasks consisting of non-word reading, comprehension, fluency, and orthographic processing to a diverse sample of adults in ABE classes. Not only did we identify a group of resilient readers in this sample, we identified three other sub-groups: unskilled readers who had poor decoding and comprehension abilities, skilled readers who possessed good decoding and comprehension abilities, and a group of individuals who had good decoding skills but poor comprehension abilities. We found that the resilient readers and good decoders/poor comprehenders had better orthographic and fluency skills compared to the unskilled readers. However, these last two groups produced different error patterns on the orthographic and fluency tasks. We discuss the implications that these very different reader profiles have for ABE programs.