The marked decline in international interest in promoting adult literacy that has occurred over the last decade has had serious consequences for literacy education in third world countries. In general, planning and implementation of literacy instruction in these areas has neither improved nor adapted itself to changing circumstances. While the functional literacy approach has been useful to educational planners in developing nations, the approach has not been without its shortcomings. A more effective approach for use in developing nations is the specific literacy approach. Before undertaking any literacy activity, practitioners using the specific literacy approach first complete a set of preliminary exercises to help them understand the relationship of literacy to a particular situation and to determine whether a given literacy activity is appropriate and feasible in that situation. A good example of such a preliminary planning activity is the 12-step planning sequence used by the Experimental World Literacy Program. When this planning model was applied in a series of case studies in The Gambia, planners were able to analyze the specific literacy requirements of various groups of people as well as their abilities and the circumventions that they used to overcome their literacy needs. The application of this model provides planners with a useful starting point from which to assess the feasibility of specific interventions. (MN)