Are there any international assessments of adult literacy?
The most recent international assessment of adult literacy is the Adult Literacy and Lifeskills Survey (ALL), an international comparative study conducted in 2003 to provide six participating countries—Bermuda, Canada, Italy, Norway, Switzerland, and the United States—with information about the prose and document skills, as well as the numeracy skills, of their adult populations. It is important to note that NAAL and ALL are fundamentally different, with different survey designs and goals. For example, as a national assessment, NAAL uses authentic prose and documents, in their entirety, that adults living in the United States encounter in everyday life, such as telephone bills. On the other hand, as an international assessment, ALL uses prose and documents that have been identified as suitable for use across countries. Thus, the stimulus materials may have been constructed, modified, or simplified for comparability. In this sense, they do not fit NAAL’s definition of authentic, everyda
