Reading is an indispensible basic skill in a media society, for which written communication is constitutive.
In connection with the primary educational goal of reading, three questions are of particular concern:
How can reading and writing skills be insured across the board?
How can the process of their acquisition be systematically classified and understood?
Finally, how can the effects of specific measures aiming to promote these skills be identified and assessed?
Answers to these questions require research collaborations that combine disciplinary perspectives from the fields of education, linguistics, and empirical literary studies.
Secondly, intensive contact between education researchers and education practitioners is also needed. Such contact allows literality research to take up questions relevant to practice, and simultaneously constitute a precondition for education practice in best utilizing the newly acquired knowledge.
The conference intends to make a contribution with respect to these two goals–strengthening interdisciplinary cooperation in literacy research and improving the practice of promoting literacy. It will focus on reading and writing acquisition in adults within the framework of remediation, but will also incorporate the entire span of education and therefore also the earlier stages in speech and writing acquisition as well as the socialization contexts of family, school, and peers.
The conferences is aimed at researchers in education, psychology and linguistics, subject didacticians, those responsible for schools and adult education, as well as other interested parties.
http://www.ph.fhnw.ch/monteverita
http://www.csf.ethz.ch
