Conducting a Spanish National Adult Literacy Survey: A Discussion of the Issues.

A discussion of issues concerning the feasibility of conducting a Spanish version of the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) is presented. The discussion is based on a 1992 seminar to address linguistic, political, and logistic concerns in such an undertaking. While the experience with the NALS guided discussion, the primary focus was on special issues concerning a Spanish version: (1) purposes and uses of a Spanish NALS; (2) issues in task (item) development, including format, translation, language style or variation used, content, structure and nature; (3) relationship to other national assessments using similar constructs; (4) issues in pretesting and population sampling; and (5) scaling of tasks, i.e., similar to or different from tasks on the three (prose, document, quantitative) scales in the English version. In each of these five categories, the comments of practitioners, policymakers, researchers, and program evaluators participating in the seminar are summarized. The report concludes with recommendations for development of a Spanish version of the NALS. Appended materials include a list of seminar participants, and a participant feedback form. Contains 10 references. (MSE) (Adjunct ERIC Clearinghouse on Literacy Education)