 |
Horizon Europe
The iRead4Skills – Intelligent Reading Improvement System for Fundamental and Transversal Skills Development is a Research & Innovation Action funded by the European Commission, Grant number: 1010094837, Topic HORIZON-CL2-2022-TRANSFORMATIONS-01-07 – Conditions
for the successful development of skills matched to needs.
Document Control
Information:
Settings | Value |
Deliverable No. | D7.5 |
Document Title: | Policy Brief 1: Skills and needs data and analysis |
Author(s): | Raquel Amaro & Ana Leite |
Reviewer(s): | Angels Catena |
Sensitivity: | Public |
Date: | 28/02/2024 |
Document Location: The latest version of this controlled document is stored in OneDrive- fcsh.unl.pt/iRead4Skills/Project/Work Packages/WP7/Policy Briefs
IREAD4SKILLS PROJECT SUMMARY 3
Reading skills are fundamental to acquire technical and scientific knowledge, either in formal education and training contexts, as Adult Learning (AL) and Vocational Educational Training (VET), or in practical and empirical working contexts, as when companies provide written specific information and/or instructions to their workers. People with low literacy skills are less able to acquire and sustain transversal and durable skills needed to stay apace with the changing job market and to lead meaningful and complete lives.
Responding to the need to create the conditions for the successful development of skills matched to the functional needs of adult population, and contributing directly to many of the issues established in the European Skills Agenda for Sustainable Competitiveness, Social Fairness and Resilience (EU 2021), the project iRead4Skills - Intelligent Reading Improvement System for Fundamental and Transversal Skills Development has as following main objectives:
To assess and reduce reading skills gaps in low literacy adults for the development of fundamental and transversal skills by:
establishing and monitoring the relation between improvement in literacy skills and improvement in other fundamental skills (such as numeracy or ICT) and transversal skills (such as technical skills, communication skills, teamworking skills, foreign language skills, customer handling skills, problem solving skills, learning skills and planning and organization skills) as well as motivation, citizenship, and well-being.
providing an intelligent reading system that evaluates texts complexity and suggests appropriate readings according to the user literacy level. The system would also be used to assist trainers and text producers to create or adapt texts with the appropriate level of complexity for their target readers.
To support the adoption and diffusion of innovation in the way low literacy adults acquire and sustain transversal and durable skills, matching the always evolving needs of the job market, by developing and putting to work an open access system, available for both trainers and trainees, that allows for advanced digitally enabled training and skills development.
Partners
No | Participant organisation name | Country |
1 | NOVA University Lisbon | Portugal |
2 | Catholic University of Louvain | Belgium |
3 | Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research | Luxembourg |
4 | Ministry of Education | Portugal |
5 | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona | Spain |
6 | Mindshaker Serviços Informáticos, Lda | Portugal |
7 | INESC ID - Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores: I&D em Lisboa | Portugal |
8 | University of Santiago de Compostela | Spain |
Advisory Board
Anne Mességué, National Coordinator of ANLCI, in France | João Queirós, Subcoordinator of PIAAC, OCDE, in Portugal |
Cäcilia Märki, Head of Basic Skills Department from SVEB FSEA, in Switzerland | Luís Rothes, Coordinator of the PIAAC, OCDE, in Portugal |
Reading skills are essential to acquire technical and scientific knowledge. This is especially relevant in the context of formal education and training contexts, as Adult Learning (AL) and Vocational Educational Training (VET), and in practical work contexts, such as when companies provide information and/or specific written instructions to their workers. However, promoting and motivating reading habits and skills in adults is quite challenging due to the lack of dedicated and/or adequate reading materials.
Literacy: oral reading fluency; reading comprehension; spelling; writing.
Reading Skills: reading fluency; reading comprehension.
Supporting the adoption and diffusion of innovation in adult training, the iRead4Skills project aims to promote the development of reading skills through an innovative intelligent system that evaluates texts complexity and suggests reading materials adequate to the user reading level, which can also be used by trainers in the creation or adaptation of texts with the appropriate level of complexity for their individual students.
This means contributing:
to upskilling and reskilling of people,
to developing their flexibility and adapting abilities, including staying apace with new skills related to technology, but also
to new educational strategies related to formal education, responding to individual and social needs, and boosting adults’ motivation and participation, and
to innovative and inclusive education systems, using digital technologies to provide quality training. The goals of this project focus on reading skills and are attuned with creating the conditions for the successful
“Literacy and numeracy skills form a Foundation for developing higher-order cognitive skills such as analytic reasoning and are essential for accessing and understanding specific domains of knowledge. In addition, they are relevant across a range of life contexts, from education and work to home, social life, and interaction with public authorities.” (OECD 2019:36)
development of skills matched to needs, responding directly to many of the issues established in the European Skills Agenda for Sustainable Competitiveness, Social Fairness and Resilience (EU 2021) and contributing to several European Commission's policy priorities, such as A Europe fit for the digital age, by empowering people and educational systems with innovative and inclusive technologies, An economy that works for people, by contributing to the European Skills Agenda, or A new push for European democracy, by providing people with skills that allow them to be more informed, to deal with misinformation and to be more active and participating citizens.
By combining an interdisciplinarity team covering different fields of expertise such as ICT, Linguistics, Economics and Education, the iRead4Skills project will provide groundbreaking research and innovation, going beyond the current state of the art in several key areas:
Assessing the response to specific needs from the AL and VET communities involved and devising ways to evaluate results to inform proposals for employers and policy makers.
The training difficulties of adult learners can range from basic reading skills to motivational factors. The development of the iRead4Skills system goes beyond existing studies and tools due to its relational and cooperative nature. Based on input from end-users and covering their real needs, the project will provide a new way to assess the response of individuals, skill development institutions, and employers to issues on reading skills and to gather data to inform policy makers on the conditions for the successful development of skills. At this stage of the project, we have reach out and secured the involvement and cooperation of both trainees and trainers in AL and VET and compile some interesting data on reading skills needs and preferences.
Developing new complexity measures and base data sets
iRead4Skills solution goes beyond existing systems by developing and testing a language-designed system based on the direct input from AL and VET trainers and learners. This means that actual end-users will provide the base classification of texts according to their sensitivity to complexity, and that new complexity levels and features are to be researched from these new and valuable data sets. This also means new complexity measures based, not on proficiency levels of a second language, but on issues of complexity for native speakers, which can be drastically different. At this stage of the project, we have already defined the complexity framework relevant for our target audience and purposes, and the classification and annotation of texts by the end-users in Portugal, France and Belgium and Spain.
Testing and developing Natural Language Processing systems directly with end-users
iRead4Skills innovates the current paradigm for developing machine-learning systems, devised and tested only on data sets. Current NLP systems produced in academia are not developed nor tested in real case scenarios, where end-users evaluate their usability and utility. In the iRead4Skills project, we will go the extra mile, and test the system directly with specific end-users (i.e., low literacy adults). This will allow us to devise an intelligent tool, attuned to the user, but also to gather solid evidence to assess its impact.
Promoting the use of Art and Culture as a means to develop fundamental and transversal skills
By including reading materials from a wide range of domains (literature, history/social studies, science, etc.), iRead4Skills provides a foundation of knowledge that will help adult learners to be better readers in all domains. In addition to professional and scientific training, the project will contribute to raise interest in humanistic, scientific, and technological knowledge of adult population, to bring adult readers closer to literature, culture, and general information; and to improve communication and educational practices for all.
All in all, the project aims at all people with low literacy skills interested in reading and at all people/entities/organizations promoting reading. AL and VET centres in Belgium, France, Portugal, and Spain, including trainers and trainees can be identified as the iRead4Skills direct beneficiaries.
The project primary stakeholders for exploitation purposes are national and local entities interested in the promotion of reading habits/culture dissemination and consumption, such as:
governmental ministries, general directorates of education, etc., to enforce more effective teaching/learning methods and improve the job market and society, but, also,
culture actors, such as libraries, publishers, and content producers - to augment their audiences/customers.
To reach these audiences, the iRead4Skills project has already established contacts and cooperation protocols with AL and VET centres and professionals in the relevant geopolitical intervention areas, namely, Belgium, France, Portugal, and Spain, having also reached AL centres in Argentina. We have also secured cooperation bridges with relevant stakeholders dedicated to skills, adult training, and reading and literacy promotion, such as ANQEP - National Agency for Qualification and Professional Training, Portugal, ESBN - European Basic Skills Network, SVEB - Swiss Federation for Adult Learning, Switzerland, ANLCI - Agence nationale de lutte contre l'illettrisme, France, SPRP - Savoirs pour Réussir, France, Ille & Vilaine, France, Xunta de Galicia - Consellería de Cultura, Educación, Formación Profesional e Universidades, Spain, Fundació Gentis, Spain, Federación de Asociaciones de Educación de personas Adultas, Spain, FECEI - Federación Española de Centros de Enseñanza de Idiomas, Spain.
Besides the publication of objective results concerning the relation between the improvement of reading skills and other fundamental and transversal skills, the project also expects the production of new fundamental
knowledge on complexity analysis, within the different key areas coverage by the project (Linguistics, Education, Natural Language Processing, Socioeconomics), usable in many other contexts.
The major and more tangible result is, however, the development of the iRead4Skills system, a new ICT system, open access web-based system, able to provide:
complexity analysis of texts,
reading suggestions according to the complexity level of texts,
assistance in the simplification of texts.
It is important to underline the project’s singularity that emerges from this section. On the one hand, it benefits from an interdisciplinarity team covering different fields of expertise such as ICT, Linguistics, Economics and Education. On the other hand, it is based on input from end-users (i.e., low literacy adults) which meets their real needs and at the same time makes possible an innovative approach for developing and testing machine- learning systems. Finally, unlike in other resources, iRead4Skills is based on issues of complexity for native speakers and not on proficiency levels of a second language.
The successful achievement of iRead4Skills project contributes in a significant scale to enable policymakers to better understand, measure and reduce skills gaps, resulting in policy recommendations towards learner centred flexibility in AL and VET contents and training materials, and towards a generalized use of these type of systems in cooperation with the culture and science actors. Using and disseminating information on the complexity (or its lack thereof) of existing and new literature and other reading materials in libraries, book covers, newspapers, etc., would immediately open a whole new world of information for a still excluded part of the population.
This Policy Brief provides a quick overview of the work developed so far, concerning data on reading needs and skills, and on the relation between reading skills gaps and socio-economic, employment and personal conditions, the advancement of the complexity framework directed to adult population with low literacy skills, and the collection of datasets, as well as the lessons learned in this cooperative process.
Two specific surveys were designed and disseminated to collect the data. The first survey focuses on reading skills and adult learning and was carried out among trainers and trainees. It reported skills in the categories Home, Transport, Shopping and Healthcare and revealed that respondents like to read about current issues of society, health, and wellness. The second survey focuses on how reading difficulties impact access to employment and individual well-being. Even though there is a high number of missing observations for certain questions, it is important to underline that this second survey allows to observe the impact that reading training has had on people's literacy skills, their other skills and professional situation.
Data on reading needs and skills
To collect the relevant data in a bottom-up approach, we have designed and disseminated two specific surveys:
Reading Skills survey, a qualitative and a quantitative survey on people who are following AL and VET courses or that act as trainers, designed with the participation of the in-the-field partners and others with knowledge on reading skills and adult learning, to assure that the survey covers the specific information required for the subsequent work packages (i.e., text genres, domains, cultural and scientific expectations,
etc.). The survey collected information from adults, trainers/teachers and trainees/students in AL and VET centres in Portugal, Belgium, France, and Spain.
Considering that the target group includes people with low reading skills, the survey included an oral version of all the contents, so people could provide informed consent concerning the goals of the survey, the data collected, and the data protection measures in place and could listen to the questions and select the appropriate answers. Equivalent versions of the survey in French, Portuguese, and Spanish were devised.
A summary of the most relevant results is presented below:
Overall, more women responded to the survey. Most of the respondents stated that they read to learn new things and, after that, to learn about the news. In general, respondents like to read about current issues of society, and health and wellness. Considering the reading skills and needs in the categories Home, Transport, Shopping and Healthcare, the respondents reported that:
Home: they do not read or they read and understand everything in home-related texts (adverts in newspapers, magazines or on the internet, information or adverts on posters, lease agreement and condominium regulations).
Transport: they generally read and overall comprehend timetables, destinations and stops on posters or billboards, but do not read or fully understand information about strikes and disruptions in transport information.
Shopping: they read and understand (a little or a lot) the information presented in products packaging and labelling when shopping, and product and restaurant prices on posters, flyers, leaflets or catalogues.
Health: they read partly or fully understood texts related to healthcare issues (medical prescriptions, medicine leaflets and packaging, information about health services, etc.).
Full information on the survey, as well as the three full surveys openly accessible here: https://zenodo.org/records/10179536.
Overall skills and gaps survey, aiming at studying how reading difficulties impact access to employment and individual well-being in adults who have undergone reading education in AL and VET centres, including aspects such as personal confidence, acquisition of other skills (mathematics, computer literacy, soft skills, etc). These impacts were examined from both a subjective perspective, through individuals' perceptions of the consequences of their reading difficulties on various aspects of their lives, and from an objective perspective, through changes in personal circumstances enabled by participating in reading education (human capital, employment status, etc.).
The same survey was available in three languages, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. Respondents were given the option to answer the survey in multiple sittings. Participation in the survey was voluntary and respondents are informed of the survey's objective and their rights regarding data protection.
The questionnaire consisted of the following six modules:
about the country where they received their education, whether they faced academic challenges, and in which languages they learned to read.
More information on the survey structure is openly accessible here: https://zenodo.org/records/10181135.
The surveys were widely disseminated with the support of all partners and peer institutions that work directly with AL and VET centres and announced in the project website (https://iread4skills.com/activities/#surveys; https://iread4skills.com/fr/activites/; https://iread4skills.com/es/actividades/; https://iread4skills.com/ptpt/atividades/), as well as in the project social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, X, YouTube). The dissemination of the surveys was also supported by dedicated media (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e-qWMvG5rM; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy94cBCxhoc; and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz5c3_hRC2c).
Together with a literature review, the results from the second survey were further used to study the link between literacy skills, on the one hand, and other skills and working life, on the other hand. This study allows to observe the impact that reading training has had on people's literacy skills, their other skills and professional situation. The survey of individuals who have undergone training to enhance their reading skills revealed the challenges of conducting research on this group. Apart from Portugal, the response rate was extremely low. There is a high number of missing observations for certain questions due to respondents choosing not to answer or being unable to provide an opinion. This limitation restricts the possibility of utilizing certain questions and making comparisons based on the socio-demographic characteristics of the respondents. In total, 455 individuals participated in the survey. It is important to note that the results cannot be generalised to individuals who have taken reading training in the countries studied due to the nonrepresentative sample. Nevertheless, the results enable us to draw conclusions and pinpoint some of the challenges faced by these individuals, as well identify new research directions, as briefly reported below:
The full literature review, and well as the results from the second survey are openly accessible in: https://zenodo.org/records/10459030.
Complexity framework
Considering the overall goals of the iRead4Skills project, the methodology for establishing the framework for the complexity levels addressed in the project considered three major steps:
Compiling and evaluating existing tools and frameworks relevant for text readability and complexity assessment.
Determining a base proposal for three text complexity levels relevant for our target audience (adult native speakers with low reading skills) and for our goals (to promote the development of reading skills through an innovative intelligent system that evaluates texts complexity and suggests reading materials adequate to the user reading level, which can also be used by trainers in the creation or adaptation of texts with the appropriate level of complexity for their individual students).
Validating and making the necessary adjustments to the base proposal to inform a thorough and objective characterization of the text complexity levels addressed by the project.
In general terms, this meant gathering information to juxtapose the descriptors from PIAAC, ALTE and CEFR1 proficiency levels into three levels that would reflect different reading complexity/difficulties for Spanish, French and Portuguese texts, basing the literacy skills on the literacy model of the first three levels from PIAAC (ranging from A1 to B1 CEFR levels). These are broadly characterised both internationally and cross- linguistically with norm-referenced descriptors that provide guidelines and bring reliability and comparability to teaching environments and assessment across different societal realities. The resulting set of descriptors were then presented for independent classification to trainers from AL and VET centres in Belgium, France, Portugal, and Spain. The results of this task were then discussed in focus groups to understand and adjust, whenever possible, conflicting judgements. The result is a framework for text analysis and classification, consisting of language-dependent tables with the characterization of the complexity levels relevant for adult population with low literacy skills.
1 PIACC - Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (OECD 2013), ALTE - Association of Language Testers in Europe (ALTE 2020) and CEFR - Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR 2020).
For the iRead4Skills project, we designated three text complexity levels – Very Easy (corresponding to A1),
Easy (corresponding to A2), Plain (corresponding to B1).
The grading system was influenced by the CEFR’s frame of reference (Council of Europe, 2020), namely in its labels (A1, A2, B1) and the naming system was chosen considering two criteria: versatility and transparency. Versatility, since CEFR is the most widely used frame of reference for languages in Europe. Future users of our complexity analysis system will be able to easily understand and use the grading system, as well as adapting it to other grading systems. Transparency, considering simplicity and other already existing initiatives (e.g., Plain language). Given the potential target users of the iRead4Skills system, we consider that transparent and familiar names, characterizing the texts and not the readers, will contribute to the use of the system.
The reason for postulating these three levels of text complexity is also linked to the target audience of the project. These three levels of complexity were postulated considering that i) they were the relevant levels for developing and promoting reading skills and habits (e.g., starting in A1 and not pre-AI or A0, which are closer to the alphabetization process), and ii) they were the ones most problematic for trainers, since reading materials of these levels are not easy to find.
The levels of complexity defined for the project can be functionally described as follows:
The complete description of the iRead4Skills Complexity Levels and framework can be openly accessed here: https://zenodo.org/records/10459090.
Data sets: corpora and lexicons
The compilation of this first dataset of texts was based on the complexity levels established as relevant for the project and on the expected needs of learners and trainers, resulting from the surveys and close cooperation with AL and VET centres. This data set is a collection of written texts of several genres and levels of complexity, in txt format, and is composed of three sub corpora: French, Portuguese and Spanish. Each of the sub corpora considers different complexity levels and covers texts from the following communication domains, and respective genres and subtypes:
personal communication; institutional/professional communication; social media; commercial communication/dissemination; non-fiction book; fiction book; didactic book; academic/school; political communication/dissemination; legal documents; religious texts/dissemination.
This dataset provides the basis for the training and test sets for the complexity analysis systems for the three languages of the project: French, Portuguese, and Spanish. The dataset will be further enhanced, validated, and annotated by end-users, originating forthcoming versions and a second, derived, dataset.
Full access to the dataset is available here: https://zenodo.org/records/10055909.
As described in the literature from its beginning to date, and as considered in the descriptors of complexity in use for the iRead4Skills purposes, the words used in the texts are an essential factor of complexity. An automatic complexity analysis requires, thus, information on the lexicon used and/or expected at each level. However, complexity analysis targeting adult native speakers may require lexical resources that somewhat differ from existent resources related to lexical complexity directed to second language learners, as the passive knowledge and the needs from native speakers are expected to be different.
To define the relevant lexicons, the iRead4Skills project follows a mixed approach, as manually built resources are richer in terms of some specific information but tend to be shorter and more-time consuming to build, whereas data-driven and automatic inferred resources are quicker to get but require representative and balanced corpora as well as other structured source resources.
iRead4Skills benefits from a mixed approach considering the different available resources for each language and taking advantage from the expertise gathered in the iRead4Skills consortium, the compilation of the lexicons to be used in the project combines:
corpus-driven methods (e.g., for Portuguese, to extract graded lexicons per CEFR levels and to extract core/fundamental general language vocabularies),
automatic inference (e.g., for French using graded lexicons for CEFR levels and distributional data from iRead4Skills validated corpus),
expert grading (e.g., for Spanish to define core vocabularies usable for complexity analysis and for automatic inference tools; for Portuguese, to validate and further adapt CEFR graded lexicons to native speakers' adult case).
The idea is to allow for the use of different data sources, of different analysis and processing systems, and well as of different pipelines to reach the best outcome. Graded corpora considered as input include the corpora specifically built for the iRead4Skills project (see D3.7 Data set 1: corpora by level of complexity FR, PT and SP). The resulting lexicons will also be subject to the target-audience indirect validation, as adult learners will participate in a classification task for validating the corpora compiled, that contemplates the option of annotating words and expressions perceived as complex.
Both the lexicons and the second, annotated dataset are currently being built. Further details on the Baselines for complexity lexicons definition established for the iRead4Skills project can be openly accessed here: https://zenodo.org/records/10069793.
Following the iRead4Skills outlined paths towards achieving solid results, with the cooperation of direct beneficiaries and stakeholders, the work developed so far has also required engaging directly with people in AL and VET formal and informal training contexts. To reach these audiences, the iRead4Skills project has established contacts and cooperation with AL and VET centres, as well as individual professionals in social and education associations, located within the relevant geopolitical intervention areas, namely, Belgium, France, Portugal, and Spain. The policy implications and recommendations listed in this section reflect both the insights and remarks derived from the research activities developed, and the preliminary conclusions collected from
According to the latest European statistics on lifelong learning activities, in Europe, 43,7% of the adults aged 25-64 (ca. 125,5 million) participated in some form of education or training in 2016, 80% of which were job-related.
These numbers are even higher in most of the countries in Europe where the working languages of the iRead4Skills project are spoken: Belgium 45,2%; France 51,3% (61,5 million); Luxemburg 48,1% (70
million; Portugal 46,1%; Spain 43,4%; Switzerland 69,1%. This means that the iRead4Skills project can directly impact the lives of more than 50 million trainees, besides all involved trainers and teachers.
and informed by contact with end-users. Our goal is to contribute to European initiatives and interventions aimed at promoting reading skills and habits in the adult population, facilitating access to information, scientific and technical knowledge, and culture.
Access to information - information in plain language
There is a generalized lack of information available in accessible written formats. This is clearly evidenced by the corpora collected and by the efforts spent to find such texts.
Specifically, there is a significant shortage of texts with low
complexity in functional areas, such as pricing information, bills, and services conditions, which are essential for people to make important decisions regarding issues like acquiring services, renting a house, shopping, etc. This indicates that, despite several plain language initiatives being active globally, institutions and companies are still not actively implementing them.
Directives regarding the information that must be provided to the consumers and/or general population could also mention the need to provide this information in plain language.
The developed complexity descriptors, along with the resources produced, such as the basic/fundamental lexicon expected at each level - extracted from authentic texts and validated by end-users - are crucial resources to help in the production of such texts.
Motivation and adequacy of AL and VET
The materials specifically designed for language teaching are not adequate for the adult population with low literacy skills, as these materials do not cover: i) the topics and communication situations in which people are truly interested (e.g., healthcare, medical appointments); ii) the text genres and subtypes that people will actually need to read (e.g., medical leaflets and prescriptions, lease contracts).
To facilitate access to texts and reading for adult learners in a sustained and informed manner, adult training should include and promote the use of authentic texts and consider real situations, including informal training contexts (such as leisure, household activities, etc.).
Considering the 2030 targets set in the Commission’s European Pillar of Social Rights Action Plan at the Porto Social Commitment by which at least 60% of all adults of Europe should participate in training every year.
The survey results inform about the perceived trends but can also be used to collect updated information, on different occasions, including local and specific classes.
The devised complexity descriptors, along with the resources produced, such as the basic/fundamental lexicon expected in each level
- extracted from authentic texts and validated by end-users - are key resources to help in the production of such texts.
Cooperative and collaborative approaches in research and knowledge development
It was particularly difficult to recruit and sustain stable and motivated cooperation from the end-users, especially trainers. Trainers expressed feeling overwhelmed by constantly being asked to participate in and provide information for different studies (e.g., PIAAC), with no real and direct effect on their work and without the proper recognition of their efforts.
Provide attractive compensation for the segments of population asked to contribute to research and innovation. This could include allowing teachers/trainers to allocate some of their working time to participating in research and innovation projects or providing adequate monetary compensation for the time dedicated to the projects, without requiring the trainers' affiliation institution (if any) to be formally a beneficiary of the project.
Recognizing that end-users/target beneficiaries and professionals in the field are essential parts of a cooperative, bottom-up approach to developing knowledge and innovation will enhance the expected impact of investments in research and innovation, as well as society's overall trust in and relationship with science.
Coordinator: Raquel Amaro, PhD NOVA University Lisbon Lisbon, Portugal raquelamaro@fcsh.unl.pt
Funding programme: HORIZON Europe
Duration: March 2023 - February 2026 (36 months)
Website: https://iread4skills.com/
Social Media: https://www.facebook.com/iread4skills.com https://twitter.com/iRead4Skills https://www.linkedin.com/company/iread4skills/ https://www.youtube.com/@iRead4Skills
References
ALTE (2002). The ALTE CAN DO PROJECT(1992–2002). https://www.alte.org/ can_do/alte_cando.pdf
Council of Europe (CE) (2020). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment – Companion volume. Council of Europe Publishing, Strasbourg. https://www.coe.int/langcefr
European Union (EU) (2021). European Skills Agenda for Sustainable Competitiveness, Social Fairness and Resilience. European Commission. https://ec.europa.eu/migrant-integration/sites/default/files/2020-07/SkillsAgenda.pdf
OECD (2013). Technical report of the survey of adult skills (PIAAC). OECD Publishing. Paris.
OECD (2019). Skills Matter: Additional Results from the Survey of Adult Skills. OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/605ec8b3-en