Adults who have yet to achieve functional literacy may struggle with accessing text. In this they may be similar to the 16-year-old students who also fail to achieve functional literacy. Still younger students may demonstrate
similar profiles of low-average literacy abilities. Adult-learners however, have additional years of language experience. My study asks whether added experience with language affects adult-learner reading practices.
Over 24 weeks, 218 participants - 11-12-year olds, 16-19-year-olds and adults, took part in a repeated measures experiment, completing letter search, lexical decision, isolated word naming and contextual word naming tasks three times, with ability data also collected at each time point. Similar reading practices, differentiated by reading speed and accuracy only, will indicate that language experience does not affect adult-learners' performance. Should the linguistic markers vary between groups, however, this may give rise to further exploration of adult-learners' routes to reading and the role their added language experience plays in accessing text.