Adolescent Literacy

It is essential that adolescents are held to high expectations as they work toward high levels of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. In many middle and high school settings, particularly in content area classes, students are assumed to have developed into accurate, automatic, and fluent readers who can comprehend complex text.  However, some students will require instruction and practice in literacy components, such as word study, fluency, vocabulary, knowledge building, syntactic awareness, and comprehension. Supporting adolescent engagement and motivation must also be considered. 

The following resources provide an understanding of what is needed to support older students. 

Middle and high schools benefit from well-developed and properly implemented multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS). This includes valid and reliable assessments that provide data to accurately identify students’ needs, evidence-aligned Tier I instruction, knowledgeable educators who understand how to assess and instruct those who are still developing reading and writing skills, and evidence-aligned interventions that provide additional support. The following links are resources related to MTSS.

All educators in a school system must collaborate to support adolescent learners and align their understanding of tiers of instruction. When educators from classroom to classroom and tier to tier use different instructional language, strategies, and routines, students have to learn how each class operates on top of learning the content and/or skills taught in each class. This causes confusion for students and increases their cognitive load. Aligning instructional strategies and routines across tiers, grade levels, and content areas benefits students’ because it frees them up to focus solely on learning the content and skills being taught.  

When adolescent students are not at grade level in reading, the focus of support typically revolves around content literacy, or disciplinary literacy. While this can be helpful, many need intervention at the foundational level of reading before they can effectively apply disciplinary literacy strategies. The following resources provide guidance for building these systems of support. The first link highlights the importance of including support for foundational skills for those who need it.

Adolescents’ needs for support range from intensive intervention in foundational skills to accessing grade-level content. Teachers and school leaders must prioritize the development of a system for gathering accurate assessment data to identify students’ specific needs. 

A flowchart (also included in TRL’s Intervention Evaluation Guidelines) of an assessment model that informs instruction and intervention can be found in:

The adolescent literacy intervention selection tool guides informed choices of interventions that align with the evidence base as well as support culturally and linguistically relevant practices.

It is challenging to support adolescents’ reading intervention needs while ensuring access to rigorous, grade-level content in core classes. The Reading League’s Adolescent Reading Intervention Evaluation Guidelines (Grades 4-12), developed in partnership with lead researchers and experts on adolescent intervention, present critical guidance and helpful information derived directly from scientific reading research. Use this new resource to guide decision-making or to review current intervention materials for adolescent learners.

Although the needs of struggling adolescent readers are multifaceted, data often reveals that they are not able to decode words accurately and automatically. Because accurate and automatic decoding leads to fluent and skilled reading that enables comprehension of text, it must be assessed and a focus of instruction.

Research from the science of reading provides knowledge on how to support adolescent decoding. The following resources offer guidance:

Some adolescent reading difficulties stem from weaknesses in language and language comprehension. If students are decoding accurately and automatically yet still experience difficulty comprehending texts, use assessments developed to gather data on their strengths and challenges in language comprehension to determine how to best support their needs. If data show students have difficulty expressing and comprehending language, they should be screened for developmental language disorder (DLD).

Adolescents learning the language of instruction require specialized language support, which is most effective when targeted in both instructional and intervention settings. Educators should leverage students’ home languages and cultures as assets, maintain high expectations,  and provide access to rigorous, grade-level content.

The Institute for Educational Sciences (IES) practice guides are publications based on scientific reading research, written and reviewed by experts. They provide recommendations for implementing evidence-aligned instruction and intervention. The following guides address the needs of adolescent learners.

Many state departments of education have developed excellent resources and guidance on supporting adolescent learners. The following are a few examples:

CORE Learning Adolescent Literacy Services equip educators with the knowledge and skills necessary to address the needs of all learners to equitably access and excel in high-quality Tier 1 instruction. It also provides focused solutions to accelerate the learning pace for students who are still working toward proficiency. The following are webinars, blogs, and complimentary resources:

Keys to Literacy offers a large collection of free resources to support educators in reading and writing instruction. The following list of webinars, blogs, and articles addresses literacy issues related to students in Grades 5-12.

There are critical components of instruction that should be considered in a school-wide approach to supporting the literacy needs of adolescent learners. It is necessary to develop consistent routines in each of the following resource areas outlined below:

Vocabulary and Comprehension

• Enhancing Students’ Comprehension of Text by Building Vocabulary Knowledge
• Vocabulary Matters: 5 Facts, Actions, and Resources
• Vocabulary and Comprehension: Effective Upper-Elementary Interventions for Students with Reading Difficulties
• Academic Vocabulary in the Common Core
• The Clarifying Routine: Elaborating Vocabulary Instruction
• Student Achievement Partners’ Academic Word Finder

Syntax and Writing

• The Syntax Project
• Juicy Sentence Guidance
• Simple, Compound, Complex Sentences
• Anatomy of a Sentence
• The Informed SLP Grammar Guide
• The Writing Rope
• Teaching Summarizing to Support Comprehension and Develop Writing
• The Writing Revolution

Morphology:

• Morphological Awareness: One Piece of the Literacy Pie
• Morpheme Frequency in Academic Words: Identifying High-Utility Morphemes for Instruction
• Middle School Learners’ Use of Latin Roots to Infer the Meaning of Unfamiliar Words
• Using Morphological Strategies to Help Adolescents Decode, Spell, and Comprehend Big Words in Science
• English Morphology: What it is and hHow it Ccan Help Struggling Readers and Writers 
• Morphology Flashcards
• Mini Matrix Maker
• Morpheme Frequency in English

Background Knowledge

• PACT Reading Research Recap on Developing Background Knowledge
• Text Set Project: Building Knowledge and Vocabulary
• Turn and Talk: An Evidence-Based Practice
• Close Reading of Texts Example: Gettysburg Address