Adolescent Literacy

Reading a recent text on how teens learn to read (Jetton & Dole, 2004) and I start to remember my issues with the literacy folks.

I always approached reading as emerging from engagement. If I had framed my class right and had gotten students invested in the topic at hand, then they would do battle with difficult texts. If students were given a chance to express themselves, they would happily search for the best word and slowly shape their arguments into the form I requested. The discourse of the class would aid their efforts to read.

I still think this is how you start in high-school classrooms, particularly when there are many students who struggle with reading. But I’m realizing that maybe ten minutes an hour might be well-spent in hardcore, explicit instruction on how to decode words. NOT giving vocabulary lists, but giving real sentences (from real texts) that contain difficult words, and discussing how to draw meaning from the words.

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