International Adult Skills Surveys: Andragogical Issues in Linguistic Minority Communities

The author has been working in the literacy field with francophone adults in a minority setting and in a variety of capacities for twenty years, and considers himself a reflective and critical practitioner. He strives to understand the world of adult education and skills development based on his practical experiences and observations from the field. This text is written from that perspective, based on principles of andragogy. Using inductive and deductive processes, he proposes ideas and reflections on the concept of the evaluation of basic skills of adults living in linguistic minority communities in Canada. On the theoretical side, the author uses several key studies, including an analytical background paper written for The Centre for Literacy's 2013 Summer Institute by Jean-Pierre Jeantheau, Chargé de mission national of the French Agence nationale de lutte contre l'illettrisme, on the subject of linguistic minority groups and international literacy assessments. Three personal professional experiences have particularly influenced the author's point of view. He is currently engaged, albeit in a modest way, in the adaptation of an Anglophone assessment system called CAMERA (Communication Math Employment Readiness Assessment) in francophone contexts across Canada. He has also participated in creating the Ontario Adult Literacy Curriculum Framework (OALCF) in 2010-2011, and led, in 2007-2008, a project that experimented with and evaluated Test of Workplace Essential Skills (TOWES) and Prose, Document and Quantitative (PDQ) profile tests with francophone adults with lower literacy skills (levels 1 and 2) in vocational training. The conceptual frameworks of all these tools (OALCF, CAMERA, TOWES and PDQ) use, to various degrees, the same task-based methodology and levels of complexity as the Essential Skills framework developed by the Department of Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC) and as international literacy surveys--the 1994 International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), the 2003 International Adult Literacy and Skills Survey (IALSS), and the current Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). In this report, the author proposes that in order to grasp the limitations of such frameworks for official language minority communities, readers must look closely at the complex multilingual contexts in which these communities live. He concludes by offering recommendations for conducting international assessments and interpreting results in a way that takes into account the specific context of these communities. He also outline some topics for future research in this area.