Adult education: Sometimes used to loosely describe a myriad of programs, including basic skills, adult secondary, postsecondary, graduate and post graduate studies, community and continuing education initiatives. For our purposes, adult education includes those services for adults whose K-12 education may have been disrupted or not completed, or whose level of proficiency is below the postsecondary level.

Adult Learner: An adult who is engaged in formal education or training to build his or her knowledge and skills. This education or training includes the full range of education from basic skills, literacy, English as a Second Language, high school equivalency through postsecondary education and training, work-based training, proprietary school training, and certification programs.

AEPDC (Adult Education Professional Development Consortium): A group of professional development projects funded by the Texas Education Agency with state leadership funds. This consortium provides professional development and technical assistance to adult education providers across the state. Four consortium initiatives of special interest to workforce develop-ment: the Workforce Literacy Training and Technical Assistance Project (WLTTAP); the New Teacher's Project and Tool Kit; the Adult Education Credential Project; and the ESL Professional Development Project.

Bilingual Vocational Training: Programs that prepare learners for a specific occupation using the learners' native language as well as English. Thought to be most effective when the technical instructor and the language instructor function as a team, so that language and technical learning are integrated while vocational and English language skills are emerging.

Borderlands: Communities located on either side of the Texas-Mexico border; the term can also be applied to similar communities in Arizona, California, and New Mexico.

CASAS (Comprehensive Adult Student Assessment System) and the BEST (Basic English Skills Test): Two instruments widely used to assess English language skills. Both include one-on-one oral interviews and well as reading, listening, and writing activities. They provide baseline information about the learners' English language proficiencies and are used to place learners in classes and to measure progress. The use of the oral interview allows the assessor to determine early on if the learner is literate and therefore able to complete the other assessment activities.

Case Management: The provision of a client-centered approach to the delivery of services, designed to coordinate services and provide job and career counseling during a client's participation in a program and after job placement.

Contextual Learning: An approach in which learners develop skills through application for the real world used in real world situations. This approach facilitates transfer of skills to new contexts. Often interchangeably used with the term, functional contextual learning.

Creaming: The practice of targeting for participation in programs those most likely to succeed and ignoring the hardest to serve.

Customized Training: Training designed to meet the specific requirements of employers for their employees. Post secondary institutions often generate revenue by offering customized training to area businesses and industries.

Dislocated Worker: An individual who has been terminated or laid off, or who has received notice of termination or layoff from employment, as a result of plant closure or relocation; or was self-employed but is unemployed as a result of a turn in general economic conditions; or a homemaker who has been providing unpaid services to family members in the home, has been dependent on the income of another family member, and who is unemployed or underemployed and experiencing difficulty obtaining or upgrading employment.

Distressed counties: According to data collected in 2000, those counties with unemployment rates at least 2% higher than the state's average unemployment rate, including counties adjoining other states and the Gulf of Mexico.

Economic Development Agencies: Includes local planning and zoning commissions or boards, community development agencies, and other institutions responsible for regulating, promoting, or assisting in local economic development.

Employment Skills or Employment Readiness Classes: Usually refers to short term classes to assist learners in locating job openings, completing job applications, preparing resumes, and participating effectively in job interviews. These classes are not designed to address specific occupational skills.

English Literacy Program: Indicates a program of instruction designed to help individuals of limited English proficiency achieve competence in the English language. Instruction is offered to a wide range of learners, from highly educated to those who are not educated or even literate in their native languages, and to learners falling between these two extremes.

Equipped for the Future (EFF): A customer-driven, standards-based, collaborative initiative of the National Institute for Literacy. EFF's goal is to align the components of the nation's adult learning system with a range of skills and knowledge adults need to access information, take independent action, express their own ideas and opinions, keep up with a changing world, and exercise their rights and responsibilities as workers, family members, and community members.

ESL (English as a Second Language) or ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages): Terms used interchangeably to describe English language instruction for adults who are non-native speakers. Nearly 32 million people in the U.S. speak languages other than English; more than 50 percent of the adults enrolled in English as a Second Language instruction are Hispanic. Other common first languages of adult ESL learners are French, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Chinese, and Vietnamese

Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) Program: A welfare reform initiative initiated in the late 1980's and continued into the mid 1990's; a predecessor to the CHOICES Program and designed to assist individuals in becoming self-sufficient through temporary financial assistance, support services, and employment, with limited access to education and training opportunities.

Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA): Allocated funds to the states in order for them to provide training and some income maintenance for dislocated workers, regardless of cause of job separation. Since the total amount of funds appropriated for this program was so small, JTPA benefits tended to be concentrated on providing training, with few funds remaining for supplemental income support payments.

Labor Market Area: An economically integrated geographic area within which individuals can reside and find employment.

Local Workforce Development Board: A board established by the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 and responsible for promoting and supporting workforce development and employment opportunities in a specific geographic area.

Limited English Proficient (LEP): A term used to describe learners with limited English language skills.

Literacy: The ability to read, write, and understand words, sentences and longer text. This includes the ability to read and understand written material presented in different ways, such as in a chart, sign, newspaper article, etc. The most current definition states that literacy includes individuals' ability to effectively participate in their communities as workers, parents, and citizens. Learners functioning at the literacy level may have no knowledge of English and may have limited literacy skills in their native language(s), or may be literate in a language which uses a non-Roman alphabet.

Learner-Centered Instruction: Instruction which builds on the strengths, interests, and needs of learners as well as on their conceptual and cultural knowledge.

Local Workforce Development Board (LWDB): A local or regional economic development entity responsible for administering local economic development initiatives.

Maquiladora: An assembly plant in Mexico run by U.S. or other foreign interests. Parts are shipped to Mexico, products are assembled, and finished goods are returned to markets in the country of origin. Sometimes referred to as a "twin plant" when a manufacturer maintains plants on both sides of the border.

NAFTA Trade Adjustment Assistance (NAFTA-TAA): A 1993 amendment to the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program designed to provide benefits to workers whose job loss can be attributed to imports from or a production shift to Canada or Mexico. Title III of the Job Training Partnership Act, the Economic Dislocated Worker Adjustment Assistance Act (EDWAA) also provides employment assistance to dislocated workers.

National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS): A national survey conducted in 1993 which provided a profile of the literacy skills of the nation's adult population. Results revealed that more than 40% of all American adults have literacy levels of 1 and 2 (on a scale of 1 to 5), which is below the level required to secure jobs with good wages. In Texas' border communities, approximately 50% to 60% of adult residents function at literacy level 1.

Performance-Based / Competency-Based Learning and Assessment: An instructional approach and tool for measuring student learning in terms of the learner's ability to construct or produce a response to a task or item. Performance objectives keep the instruction focused and efficient, and testing for the acquisition of the objectives satisfies program evaluation. Examples include problem-solving scenarios, journals, projects, performance, computer simulation tasks, and portfolios.

Postsecondary Educational Institution: An institution of higher education, typically for those individuals who have completed their elementary and secondary studies.

Rapid Response Activity: A team effort of emergency assistance, usually provided by the state or by an entity designated by the state, and designed to coordinate services for dislocated workers. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) requires employers to give workers advance notice of plant closings/layoffs, and to notify the Texas Workforce Commission of pending layoffs.

SCANS (Secretary of Labor's Commission on Necessary Skills): A ten-year old initiative of the U.S. Department of Labor identifying skills and competencies needed to perform successfully in the world of work. While not comprehensive in scope, it serves as one of the earliest efforts to identify work skills and competencies needed by American workers.

Stakeholders: Those with a vested interest in the integration of literacy services and workforce development - education providers, federal, state, and local human services agencies, federal, state, and local elected officials, businesses, unions, correctional institutions, institutions of higher learning, elementary and secondary school systems, libraries, community-based organizations, volunteer organizations, faith-based organizations, business and professional organizations.

Support Services: Transportation, childcare, dependent care, housing, and needs-related payments to enable an individual to participate in activities authorized by WIA.

TABE (Test of Adult Basic Education): Another assessment instrument widely used by adult and workforce education practitioners. It is not, however, designed to assess the skills of learners with very limited English language skills although a Spanish version is available and frequently used with adult learners who wish to prepare for the GED in Spanish.

Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA): a federal program established in 1962 to assist workers whose job loss can in part be attributed to import competition. TAA provides payment for up to 104 weeks of training and up to 52 weeks of income support payments after unemployment insurance is exhausted, as well as job search assistance and job relocation assistance.

VESL (Vocational ESL): The study of English words, sentences, text and oral language related specifically to one job or career field. VESL includes terms and conversation that students will actually use on the job.

Workforce ESL: An effort to integrate employment preparation into the adult ESL curriculum. It attempts to incorporate employment skills training into ESL instruction, combining communicative and behavioral objectives with linguistic objectives to improve learners' abilities to function in an employment context.

Workforce Investment Act of 1998: Federal law providing the framework for a national workforce preparation and employment system designed to meet the needs of the nation's businesses as well as job seekers and workers wanting to further their careers. Title II of the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) of 1998, defines literacy as "an individual's ability to read, write, speak in English, compute and solve problems at levels of proficiency necessary to function on the job, in the family of the individual, and in society." As information and technology have become increasingly important, the skills needed to function successfully have gone beyond reading, and literacy has come to include much more in its current definition.

Title II addresses the broad purposes of adult education, including the goals to assist adults in becoming literate and obtaining the knowledge and skills necessary for employment and self-sufficiency; obtaining the educational skills necessary to become full partners in their children's education; and assisting adults in completing high school or the equivalent. It includes literacy and basic skills education; instruction in English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL), also known as English as a Second Language (ESL); and preparation for the General Education Development (GED) exam.

Workplace Literacy and Education Programs: Referred to in this report as Workforce-Related Education Programs, since the nature of the program has more to do with goals and objectives than with actual location. These programs are designed to focus on the literacy and basic skills training workers need to gain new employment, retain present jobs, advance in their careers, or increase productivity.