This paper focuses on one of the South African national options for the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), namely the Evaluation of Adult Literacy in private and public training centres in South Africa. According to UNESCO statistics, two-thirds of the world's 860 million illiterates are women. 70% of illiterate adults in the world live in Sub-Saharan Africa, Southern and Western Asia, Arab countries and North Africa. South Africa has 6 million adults over the age of 16 years that have never attended school and cannot read or write and 55 % of South Africa's disadvantaged adult population is functionally illiterate and hence cannot contribute effectively to the economy. This part of the SA PIRLS study aims to determine the level of reading literacy amongst adults attending Adult Basic Education and Training in Public and Project Literacy adult learning centres and to ascertain how proficient are the ABET level 2 Adult learners in English and mother tongue. Furthermore, the study aims to determine how comparable the outcomes for ABET level 2 are to those of Grade 4 reading literacy given that theoretically, the National Qualifications Framework states that they are. This paper presents an overview of the main design issues as well as the findings of the pilot study.