Literacy Before It Counts: Legibility and Recognition of Adult Literacy Beyond Standardized Assessment

Within dominant policy discourses, adults who score poorly on standardized assessments are often positioned as deficient or lacking because they do not conform to institutionally valued forms of reading and writing. Although these adults often use literacy in complex ways in their daily lives, these vernacular (everyday, out-of-school) literacies do not count. Drawing on New Literacy Studies, recognition theory, and scholarship examining literacy across prisons, transnational families, historically marginalized communities, and multimodal contexts, this article examines how literacy becomes institutionally legible and socially recognizable. We argue that adults’ sophisticated everyday literacy practices are institutionally undervalued because they do not align with dominant forms and expectations. Central to this analysis is a distinction between legibility and recognition: literacy may be institutionally illegible because it appears in forms institutions do not know how to read, or it may become legible while still being socially misrecognized and devalued. Adults must engage in costly translation labor to convert their literacies into institutionally acceptable forms and to access recognition, legitimacy, and opportunity. This article argues that literacy exists prior to institutional recognition and that adult literacy education must move beyond deficit-based frameworks toward broader understandings of literacy while still supporting adults’ access to dominant literacies. Implications for adult literacy policy, assessment, instruction, and research are discussed.