Regina Duarte is the Portuguese National Reading Plan Director, representing the Ministry of Education and Science of Portugal (MEC), and a member of the Consortium of the iRead4Skills project, funded by the European Union (HORIZON-CL2-2022-TRANSFORMATIONS-01-07). We appreciate your availability to answer a few questions:

1.Who is Regina Duarte, Portuguese National Reading Plan Director?

I'm the director of the Portuguese National Reading Plan, a government institute for reading policies. I hold a PhD in the Teaching of Literature, I am the founder of the Anglo-Portuguese School of London and have always worked in education.

2.What role do the MEC/National Reading Plan play in the iRead4Skills project?

In the iRead4Skills project, I coordinate the representation of the Ministry of Education. Our team is responsible for WP7, the work package that manages communication for the entire consortium. Beyond this, we play a key role in other critical phases of the project, particularly in collaborating with adult training centers —essential from the project's beginning for corpus development and in testing the system's tools.

3.What are the objectives of this international project?

The project aims to improve literacy levels among the adult population. It seeks to develop a system for analyzing and classifying the complexity of texts of all kinds, from utilitarian to literary, allowing them to be adapted to readers with different proficiency levels. Access to reading texts of lower complexity enables access to information while also providing the necessary practice to progress to higher complexity levels. The goal is to ensure greater access to information and culture for the general population.

4.How has the experience been working with other Consortium members from different geocultural and national backgrounds?

It's being very challenging, in a positive way. The teams come from different areas, in addition to diverse national and cultural backgrounds. This always lead us to question our acquired knowledge, and we have learned a lot from each others' realities. There is a strong spirit of collaboration, and we all strive to improve and help one another. It is also interesting to see how different countries approach adult education, with the common goal of improving literacy levels.

5.How can the project help improve literacy among Portuguese-speaking adults in Portugal, Europe, and worldwide?

This project aims to create an easy-to-use, free system that can be directly used by end users or by trainers, teachers, and librarians to organize and classify the complexity of the texts they suggest. Considering that reading skills progressively become more complex, need to be trained, and are part of an ongoing process, ensuring access to appropriate texts is crucial at two important levels: to motivate reading, which ceases to be an exercise in frustration; and to foster reading and civic autonomy. An adult who can access information is not limited in their citizenship.

6.Can you describe the project in three words?

Literacy; citizenship; access