First, the good news: U.S. elementary school kids are improving in reading, getting the highest reading scores in over three decades, and even narrowing the racial achievement gap in that area. The bad news: by the time typical 4th graders get to 8th grade, often their reading skills don't grow enough to meet the challenging literacy demands of high school study. Ultimately, according to the Carnegie Corporation of New York reportTime to Act: An Agenda for Advancing Adolescent Literacy for College and Career Success, many students graduate ill-prepared for college and work.
"The big challenge in high school reading is to read about what you don't know a lot about and learn while reading it," says Catherine Snow, who chairs the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Literacy that produced the report.
Snow, a veteran literacy researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, points out that teens are often skilled enough at reading what's familiar and immediately engaging to them, such as young adult fiction or sports, but the cognitive demands required for comprehending high school biology, chemistry, math, and social studies are much greater. Snow suggests this type of reading requires students to understand highly theoritical concepts about subjects with which they aren't familiar. She likens the comprehension process to one learning how to overhaul a car engine by reading a manual—before having any practical familiarity with what's underneath the hood.
The 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data show that only 35 percent of U.S. 12th graders were considered "proficient" in reading, which means that nearly 6 in 10 students wouldn't be able to explain the use of irony and symbolism in a literary passage or apply directions from a practical nonfiction text, according to NAEP criteria.
At the secondary level, according toTime to Act, texts become longer, vocabulary becomes more technical, sentences and structural relations of passages become more complex, graphics such as illustrations, charts, and tables become more important as sources of information, and concepts become increasingly abstract and interconnected. Middle school and high school students must not only read to learn new words, facts, and ideas, they must also be able to summarize, interpret, and evaluate the texts they've read. These and other sophisticated literacy tasks make "adolescents especially vulnerable to underperformance and failure," the report asserts.
To improve adolescents' literacy skills and prepare them for success at the collegiate level, teachers can employ several important strategies.
First, Snow argues that when students rely on classroom lectures and avoid reading texts, they tend to lack the necessary skills for achieving on written tests. Lecture is still the predominant mode of instruction in secondary schools, and helps teachers convey content to students with a wide range of reading abilities; therefore, Snow suggests teachers use lectures and classroom discussions more purposefully to "send kids back to the text," and also to determine whether students have improved in their reading and comprehension.
Engaging Adolescent Readers
- Reflect frequently on how well they understand what they are reading.When students find that they are losing the meaning of a passage, they should first isolate what they don't understand, then use context clues and skills such as rereading and summarizing to get back on track.
- Connect what they already know to the information in the text. Students should bring their own background knowledge of the topic and their various experiences to the reading process. Doing so can also lead students to generate questions they would like to have answered by their reading.
- Summarize frequently while reading. By breaking the reading into smaller chunks to be processed, students continue to determine the level of their own understanding and look for meaning. By reviewing what they have just read, using headings or subheadings as stopping points, students can create a brief summary of the most important points of the larger text.
Reading with Purpose
For Snow, "direct and explicit" comprehension instruction called for by the Time to Act report should also move beyond instructional strategies to a wider view of the reading goal. Strategies have their specific purposes, she says, but "teachers should think 'Why are we asking students to read these texts and what do we want students to get out of them'?" Beers agrees: "Setting a purpose or focus for the reading is critical. Student reading comprehension increases when they read with purpose—knowing what information is desired."
- Orient students toward the organizational structure of the chapter they will be reading by defining the following: "What is this about? Why are we reading it? What do I expect students to get out of it? What will the task be after reading it (i.e., what will students do with the information acquired?)"
- Preteach problematic key terms.
- Provide some key background information that will aid in students' understanding of the text.
Help students prepare further for reading by encouraging them to do a quick scan of the text, paying attention to the headings, subheadings, pictures, captions, and text features that will give them an overview of what is coming, Beers suggests.
Unveiling Hidden Structures
In California, some students, including English language learners, are learning how to wrestle with and draw the meaning out of complex history texts by getting into the nitty-gritty of language analysis one line at a time. The California History Project, run by the University of California, Davis, shows teachers how to help students identify key grammatical elements of a passage in order to understand the relationships between the words and gain a stronger understanding of the text's meaning.
Mary Schleppegrell, coauthor with Zhihui Fang of the book Reading in Secondary Content Areas: A Language-Based Pedagogy, conducts linguistic research at the University of Michigan to help teachers expose typical language constructions used in different kinds of academic writing.
"We're helping teachers think about how they can talk about text with students in ways that help students to get the meaning, but also to see how language constructs that meaning," says Schleppegrell.
In language analysis, teachers spend a lot of time talking about one paragraph, which levels the field because it "slows the reading down" so that even a struggling reader can engage with the text while the more advanced students can dig deeper. "It always amazes teachers that their students enjoy learning about language, talking about language, playing around with the language," adds Schleppegrell.
Supporting Students in Reading Across Content Areas
Reading in the content areas also requires understanding specialized vocabulary, organizational structures, and implied concepts.
In science, for example, students benefit from assistance with "front-loading" vocabulary before they start to read and from studying common prefixes, suffixes, and root words that will help them figure out new science terms as they encounter them, says Beers.
Science texts often use one of three organizational patterns: cause and effect, generalization to details, or problem/ solution. "If students are aware of these organizational patterns of text, they can read more efficiently and with greater understanding," Beers observes. "They also need to understand that they will have to read a science text more slowly, stopping more frequently to check for understanding and to summarize what they have read."
To help her 9th and 10th grade global studies students think like historians, Kerry Fitch, who teaches at the Penn Yan Academy in Penn Yan, N.Y., uses the "Think Aloud" strategy to model for students how she engages with a text she is reading. She will stop to note new vocabulary, infer from the text, state an observation, or raise a question.
"The 'Think Aloud' model definitely helped. When students could identify vocabulary and were able to use it over and over again, they constructed deeper meanings because the vocabulary words were not used in isolation," Fitch notes. "Being able to determine importance led them to defend their ideas and create talk around the text. And questioning made them think like a historian, because they were starting to wonder and reflect."
As Fitch's students gained familiarity with vocabulary and concepts like bias, making claims, and cause and effect, their discussions also became richer and more passionate, Fitch says. Their talk, in turn, improved their writing "tenfold," she adds.
Such sophisticated reading (and the thinking and writing skills it implies) at the high school level, says Snow, enables students who work at them to "establish [their] own independent point of view on all sorts of things, transcending the merger of received opinions." In other
words, they are students positioned for college.
words, they are students positioned for college.
