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Why is Everyone Talking about Adolescent Literacy?

For years, there was a widespread assumption that reading instruction was finished by the end of 3rd grade. The successful 3rd-grade reader was assumed to be prepared for content-area reading in later elementary and secondary grades. But even students who read well by the end of 3rd grade can struggle with comprehension in later grades. We refer to the massive investment in primary grades literacy instruction while neglecting later literacy development as the inoculation fallacy--the fallacy that an early vaccination of reading instruction protects permanently against reading failure. The need for literacy instruction does not end with the 3rd grade, or even in high school. Although National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores have increased for 4th graders, they have not improved at 8th or 12th grade (NAEP 2007). Although U.S. children perform fairly well in international comparisons at 4th grade, their ranking falls precipitously by 10th grade (PISA 2003). Although 85% of U.S. residents aged 25 or over have high school diplomas (Stoops 2004), colleges must offer remedial reading and writing courses for an alarmingly high percentage of students, suggesting that a high school diploma doesn't guarantee college-level literacy skills. All of these problems have fueled the demand for "adolescent" literacy programs, which are aimed at students from 4th grade through at least the first year of postsecondary education. This increased demand for adolescent literacy demonstrates the manifest failure of the inoculation model in literacy education. Instruction in Literacy and Its Uses Turning around failing middle and high schools requires emphasizing literacy in instruction, interventions, and professional development. Successful whole-school improvement efforts have established clear goals for students' general literacy skills and have stressed reading and writing in all subjects both to learn the important concepts in the subject and to strengthen literacy skills. To accomplish this, schools must enable teachers to work with each other and with such literacy professionals as coaches and professional development providers (Carnegie Council on Advancing Adolescent Literacy 2010). Schools may need to rethink such current structures as departmental divisions and class schedules in order to facilitate these changes. Effective practices incorporate knowledge of how adolescents learn to read, write, and use literacy to learn, and how students' cultural, social, psychological, and linguistic development might shape how, why, and when they read and write. Emphasizing "literacy" does not mean literacy instruction, intervention, or professional development should deflect attention from subject-area learning. However, deep learning in the subject areas requires complex literacy skills. Students must learn to use literacy and language as tools for comprehending and representing subject-area concepts. Designing literacy instruction for adolescents has three components: * Continued development of general language and literacy skills; * Incorporating literacy into content-area instruction; and * Supporting struggling readers. The first of these, usually thought of as the task of the English teacher, encompasses teaching grammar, vocabulary, writing, and reading comprehension. Because these literacy skills build on oral language, they require particular attention in schools serving language minority and low-income students (RAND Reading Study Group 2002). When English teachers move beyond simply engaging students in literature or in writing, they typically focus on such comprehension strategies as previewing, predicting, monitoring, questioning, and summarizing. Though endorsed as a practice of proven effectiveness (National Reading Panel 2000), teachers can overdo this type of instruction (McKeown, Beck, and Blake 2009). Strategies are actions taken consciously to address a problem or achieve a goal. …