Counseling and Special Education

This paper describes a study in which data from the National Adult Literacy Survey were analyzed to examine the association between adults ' reading practices and literacy proficiencies. Reading practices involved reading five print contents: newspapers, magazines, books, and brief documents for work and personal use. Literacy proficiences were assessed by performance on three scales: prose, document, and quantitative literacy tasks. The results showed that reading multiple print contents has a significant impact on all three literacy proficiencies. Adults who regularly reading even a single print content significantly outperform adults who do not read on the literacy skill measures. Based on these results, three principles concerning expert reading practices among adults readers are described. Reading Practices 3 Educators and psychologists have long been interested in the kinds of textual materials which adult read. This interest has been rooted in the desire to understand how various reading practices contribute to the development of reading skills (Gray & Rogers, 1956), intellectual abilities (West, Stanovich, & Mitchell, 1993), and to some extent, aesthetic appreciation of literature (Rice, 1986). Gra