Experts on adolescent literacy discuss why it ranks at the top of the annual “What’s Hot, What’s Not” list and offer ways forward
Adolescent literacy topped the list of hot subjects in this year’s annual “What’s Hot, What’s Not” survey compiled by former IRA President Jack Cassidy and Drew Cassidy. The experts surveyed agreed that the subject was “extremely hot,” meaning that it had gotten a great deal of attention over the year, and they also said the attention was deserved.
Thoughtful educators naturally want to know why the subject drew so much interest and what it means for the field. One person in a position to answer is William G. Brozo, author of the IRA book To Be a Boy, To Be a Reader: Engaging Teen and Preteen Boys in Active Literacy. “A hard fact of high school life is that within any classroom the range of reading abilities can be enormous,” Brozo says. In one 10th-grade biology class he found what he called a “staggering” 15 grade-level spread. For over a third of the students, the text was either difficult or impossible to read. And for another third, it was probably not challenging enough to make the content engaging.
Many U.S. high schools produce students with world-leading skills. But national and international assessments find with depressing regularity that, in general, U.S. adolescents have widespread problems with comprehending more challenging material, and that achievement gaps exist along income, racial, ethnic, and linguistic lines. College professors and employers say many young people come out of high school unready for the complexity of the literacy tasks they face.
The Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy (JAAL) is an obvious resource for anyone interested in adolescent literacy, and the September 2006 issue featured an article titled “What’s hot in adolescent literacy 1997–2006” by Jack Cassidy, Sherrye Dee Garrett, and Estanislado S. Barrera IV on the history of adolescent literacy and the “What’s Hot” listing. (The article is available, free to JAAL subscribers and for a fee for others, in the publications section of the IRA website at www.reading.org.)
The article mentioned the advent of the U.S. Department of Education’s Striving Readers grant program as evidence of broad interest in and concern about adolescent literacy. The University of Georgia’s Donna Alvermann, interviewed for the article, also cited the Alliance for Excellent Education’s report Reading Next—A Vision for Action and Research in Middle and High School Literacy as further evidence of that concern.
Broad social trends are strong contributors. Brozo points to the surge of immigration bringing English learners into U.S. classrooms. He also points to the pervasive media that displace pleasure reading more and more as students enter adolescence.
Former IRA President Carol Santa today runs a therapeutic boarding school for teens where the staff deals with the consequences of drug abuse, negative media influences, overemphasis on material things, and overindulgent parents who fail to provide their children with boundaries and expectations. Even for kids without severe problems, these social trends can degrade school performance.
But Santa also sees problems caused by particular educational trends. She believes adolescents will work hard for teachers they respect, teachers who communicate a passion for the subject and have high expectations. But many of today’s schools are too big, Santa says; students get lost and never really connect to their teachers. Santa also decries incoherent curricula that jump from subject to subject, created by developers who have not decided what “deep understandings” they want students to come away with.
Douglas B. Fisher of San Diego State University is chair of IRA’s Adolescent Literacy Committee, and he, too, sees problems in curricula and other places. “Our traditional structures and our beliefs about literacy are getting in the way,” he says. There are thousands of strategies available to boost content reading, but they are often applied in a piecemeal way from class to class, with students being taught a different one every 50 minutes. And Fisher cautions against telling content area instructors that every teacher is a teacher of reading—teachers feel they’re being asked to do two jobs.
Fisher says he now tells content area teachers that all learning is based in language, and that they can use what we know about literacy to promote learning. He recommends that schools and districts have reading specialists create a coherent, overarching program to help all teachers. First, students should learn core reading skills and then be taught discipline-specific skills. Fisher says an article he is writing for a coming issue of JAAL will describe this thinking in more detail.
The September 2006 JAAL article by Cassidy and the others recommended more staff development and preservice focus on helping adolescents with motivation, comprehension, vocabulary, and other key areas (but decried a new trend toward phonics for adolescents). Meanwhile, Fisher said, with the diverse student needs seen today, it is time for less prescription and more “precision teaching” differentiated for each student.
Brozo agrees that the challenge is to find ways to teach academic literacies to increasingly diverse student populations. He adds that teachers need to know not only which strategies work but also why—they need to base their decision making on certain foundational principles. He has identified five such princples:
Build new understandings by connecting prior knowledge and experience with academic learning.
Motivate and sustain effort in learning.
Develop skills to promote long-term recall of information and ideas and encourage independent learning.
Foster critical interpretations and metacognition.
Use assessment as a tool for learning and future growth.
Marsha Sprague, of Christopher Newport University (CNU) in Newport News, Virginia, USA, has done a book for IRA scheduled to appear in March titled Discovering Their Voices: Engaging Adolescent Girls With Young Adult Literature. Sprague urges teachers to give adolescents books that help teens make sense of their lives, “with the idea that if they see reading as meaningful, they will want to read more.”
Sprague and her coauthor, CNU faculty member Kara Keeling, wanted to connect young women with literature that would help them navigate the serious difficulties that even academically successful teens may be dealing with.
Using literature aids retention of information and fosters a variety of thinking skills. And the enrichment it offers can turn a student into “a more thinking, caring, feeling human being,” Sprague says. “There’s a big payoff.” And that’s reason enough, the field of literacy education seems to be saying, to focus on and work toward improving adolescent literacy.
Adolescent literacy: The hottest topic. (February 2007). Reading Today, 24(4), 12.
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