Adolescent Literacy: Teaching Reading Comprehension in Middle and High School

Reading is a high focus area in elementary school, but reading comprehension instruction tends to drop off once students reach upper elementary and middle school grades. Content educators would agree, however, that many students fail to have the reading skills to successfully understand their math, social studies, and other content area textbooks as they progress in higher grades and more challenging courses. Reading ability is a key predictor of achievement in mathematics and science, and the global information economy requires today’s American youth to have far more advanced literacy skills than those required of any previous generation.

The National Center for Education Science, Institute of Education Science (IES), created a report titled Improving Adolescent Literacy: Effective Classroom and Intervention Practices. This study highlights findings from research-based strategies to improve adolescent literacy. There are four recommended practices:

• Provide explicit vocabulary instruction and strategies to help students become independent vocabulary learners.

• Provide direct and explicit comprehension strategy instruction.
• Provide opportunities for extended text discussion and student engagement.
• Provide intensive intervention for struggling readers and monitor all students' reading progress.

To acquire the skills they need, students must work hard to refine and build upon their initial reading skills. Students in upper elementary grades and in middle and high school classes need help to acquire more advanced skills, especially those related to content area learning

Pepper has recently released a new Pepper Online Workshop (POW) based on the IES report described above. In this workshop, we focus on the fourth recommended practice of providing intensive intervention for struggling readers and monitoring all students’ reading progress. The POW, titled “Interventions for Struggling Readers”, focuses on exploring what adolescent literacy looks like and how content teachers can build comprehension instruction into their existing teaching. The workshop also explores how teachers determine students’ skill levels so they can help pinpoint students that need additional assistance. While schoolwide teacher collaboration across content areas is essential for improving outcomes for struggling readers, in many situations adolescents that struggle with reading need qualified specialists to provide intensive and individualized interventions. If you are interested in learning more about reaching the needs of struggling adolescent readers, be sure to check out our new POW, Interventions for Struggling Readers.

Pepper provides a wide range of courses for teachers that allow for growth and learning opportunities. You also have access to Pepper's online learning community where you can meet others who are teaching and learning about adolescent literacy.

Interactive Summer Reading for Your Students

Teachers (of all subjects!):
Check out The New York Times's sixth annual reading contest and encourage your students to read this summer!

For the past five years, the New York Times has asked teenagers from ages 13 to 19 to read their newspaper over the summer and enter their reading contest. This year, they have improved the contest by adding a better commenting system. Each week, from June 12 - August 14, students will be posed the question, "What interested you most in The Times this week?" They can choose from articles, essays, photos, and videos they have read, seen, or watched to comment on. This creative way to get students to read has become quite popular and particularly apropos for students who don't want to read for hours on end.

Your students have to register to take part in the contest. Read all about it on The New York Times blog.

Using the Resources Within Reach

Your school librarian is a fantastic resource for helping you find just the right books to impact your students' learning in a positive way. He/She spends hours a day doing the work that you don't have time to do! Simply let your librarian know what you're looking for and set up a short appointment to go over what they've found for you. Supplemental materials, like books, can make learning rich and powerful.

Pepper offers many courses that help you utilize resources within your reach. Our ELA101 "ELA101x Resource Library Purposeful Text Selection to Supplement Core Materials" is example of this. Check out a short clip on our YouTube site.

FREE WestEd Webinar: Reading and Writing, Common Core Style!

One of the areas on which the goals of Common Core are focused is building literacy--not only in traditional ways via ELA education, but also across the curriculum. Reading and writing, and the skills that are part of reading and writing, have an enormous role to play as students learn to engage with a variety of texts, topics, ideas, and problems.

This WestEd webinar takes a closer look at Common Core Reading Anchor Standard 1, and attempts to connect it to evidence-based interpretation in other subjects and areas as well. This is a great opportunity to gain a better, clearer understanding of how the CCSS can help students develop literacy and put interpretive skills to work across disciplines.

TAKE A LOOK HERE for the webinar (approximately 34 minutes), and be sure to CLICK ON THE FOLDER to download supporting PDFs and other materials!