As readers advance beyond the beginning stages of reading and advance in their abilities to read, they become more fluent and able to comprehend a text. At this point, the advanced reader possesses the ability to make meaning from what he or she reads—the process of reading is no longer dedicated to the mechanical process of encoding and decoding a text. Instead, the process of reading is dedicated to learning and thinking. More advanced readers can infer from and analyze what they read in a book, as well as what they read in the world, even when they have limited experience with a topic. Such readers possess the critical literacy skills they will need for college and success in the workplace. These critically literate students are ready to take on complex tasks and dive into ELA-specific literacy tasks, such as engaging in text analysis and writing extension activities that demonstrate a thorough understanding of a task and text.
But what about the reader who is somewhere between these two phases—the reader who is not a beginning reader and is not an advanced reader? What about the student who can break the code—he or she can encode and decode—but struggles to apply this information to make new understandings? The reality that we all know and experience in our classrooms is that there are many students who fall into this place along the continuum, and there are many students who leave our high schools without the essential life skill of being critically literate. In fact, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results detailed in The Condition of Education 2018 report (McFarland et al., 2018) suggest that only 36 percent of eighth-grade students and 37 percent of twelfth-grade students possess literacy skills at or above the level of proficiency and over 60 percent have not met this readiness benchmark. This means that a majority of students are moving through middle school and high school without developing the literacy skills necessary to be successful in ELA classrooms. This is the group of students with which we are most concerned in this book. We know that this large group of students requires greater attention and a greater concentration on skill development. Moreover, a specific portion of these students will continue to need support in even basic literacy skill development. It is this portion of our student population that seems to be the conundrum—often, these are the students who teachers struggle to support.
Unfortunately, the struggle among many of this group of students is not always transparent, even though they make up the majority of students in classrooms. The graph in figure I.1 (page 6) represents the increasing gap in literacy as students grow up within schools, boldly demonstrating the challenges we must work to solve as educators in schools. These students are desperately in need of instruction to cultivate their intermediate literacy skills that serve as a common foundation for disciplinary literacy. These skills include building academic vocabulary, self-monitoring comprehension, applying fix-it strategies to understand a text, and applying knowledge to a prompted task (Buehl, 2017). As ELA teachers, we need to collaborate with our PLC teams to collectively shoulder the responsibility of student literacy and address these alarming statistics.
Research confirms there is a real need for disciplinary literacy instruction in the ELA classroom. Timothy and Cynthia Shanahan (2008) note the following.
▶ Adolescents in the first quarter of the 21st century read no better—and perhaps worse—than the generations before them.
Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress, n.d.
Figure I. 1: Percentage distribution of fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-grade students across NAEP reading achievement levels.
▶ For many students, the rate of growth toward college readiness actually decreases as students move from eighth to twelfth grade.
▶ American fifteen-year-olds perform worse than their peers from fourteen other countries.
▶ Disciplinary literacy is an essential component of economic and social participation.
▶ Middle and high school students need ongoing literacy instruction because early childhood and elementary instruction does not correlate to later success.
Among the many concerns within collaborative discussions about teaching and learning, literacy continually ranks as one of the most worrisome. In many of our discussions with teachers throughout North America, teachers across academic disciplines express three running concerns: (1) many students struggle with basic literacy skills, (2) many students read and write below grade level, and (3) many students do not know how to complete reading or writing assignments.
Gaps in literacy skills are staggering, and these gaps affect all areas of many students’ education. As students are marched through their schooling, the statistics demonstrate that gaps in literacy increase over the course of many students’ elementary, middle, and high school years. Columbia University Teachers College (2005) reports many students find themselves reading three to six grade levels below their peers, many students struggle mightily to comprehend informational texts, and many students graduate from high school unprepared to enter a college-level experience. Columbia University Teachers College (2005) and Michael A. Rebell (2008) further highlight the following statistics, which present significant and long-standing concerns.
▶ By age three, children of professionals have vocabularies that are nearly 50 percent greater than those of working-class children, and twice as large as those of children whose families are on welfare.
▶ By the end of fourth grade, African American, Hispanic, and poor students of all races are two years behind their wealthier, predominantly white peers in reading and mathematics. By eighth grade, they have slipped three years behind, and by twelfth grade, four years behind.
▶ Only one in fifty Hispanic and African American seventeen-year-olds can read and gain information from a specialized text, such as a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)-focused journal, compared to about one in twelve white students.
▶ By the end of high school, African American and Hispanic students’ reading and mathematics skills are roughly the same as those of white students in the eighth grade.
▶ Among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, about 90 percent of whites have either completed high school or earned a GED. Among African Americans, the rate is 81 percent; among Hispanics, 63 percent.
▶ African American students are only about 50 percent as likely (and Hispanics about 33 percent as likely) as white students to earn a bachelor’s degree by age twenty-nine.
Statistical results like these are a stark reminder that we need to focus our attention on the literacy development of students in every corner of our schools. For the grades 6–12 ELA teacher, developing students’ abilities to comprehend informational texts should stand out as an important goal, as these abilities are central to state and national standards for ELA, skill development, and curriculum content expectations. As we will note throughout this book, reading and writing strategies in an ELA classroom often require different instructional approaches that ELA teachers must collaborate on. These approaches must be tailored to meet the needs of every student and demand innovative thinking.
In this book, we offer suggestions focused on teaching students intermediate literacy skills. These are important skills to attain because students with strong intermediate literacy skills have essentially developed an awareness of their own active comprehension, and they know what to do when comprehension begins to feel shaky. It is vital that, within our disciplines, we don’t jump ahead of intermediate literacy but instead continually model this phase for our students and provide opportunities for them to practice these skills in a constructive and guided manner.
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