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Key Areas of Effective Adolescent Literacy Programs

What is adolescent literacy?

This includes all reading instruction for students grades 4-12. This is a transition from learning to read, to reading to learn.

What is the importance of academic literacy?

Within academic literacy, there is disciplinary literacy, which includes specialized and complex literacy to improve content area knowledge. However, in order to review and digest this type of literacy, there are very specific skills required of students. This goes beyond simply the ability to read, and deeper into the ability to navigate content area texts.

What is narrative text?

It explains who did what to whom and why. It can be in fiction or non-fiction format, and is usually used to facilitate student interest and build background knowledge. It is a key type of academic literacy and is used very commonly in content-area classrooms.

What is expository text?

These are more specialized and complex texts used in the content-area classrooms. Reading these types of texts takes specific skills and significant practice.

Why use explicit instruction to teach adolescent literacy skills?

These are academic literacy skills, and require being taught just as all other skills are. Students can universally benefit from explicit instruction. It allows for students to gain gradual independent use over the literacy skills.

5 Areas of Literacy Instruction:

1. Word Study : Improves comprehension, fluency, and vocabulary. This can benefit all ages of students and support their decoding abilities. Decoding multi-part and multi-syllabic words is critical in content area literacy. This more complex decoding comes with practice, and requires support from an educator.

2. Fluency : When reading is fluent, more energy can be focused on comprehension. This can be supported greatly through repeated readings.

3. Vocabulary : Students make greater gains in comprehension when they understand words or have the ability to figure out unknown words. This skill requires specific word-learning instruction.

4. Comprehension : This supports students in learning from the content they read. Some concepts that can be used include activating prior knowledge, monitoring comprehension, asking and generating questions, use of graphic organizers, mnemonic strategies, text structure understanding, summarization, reciprocal teaching, and support of metacognition.

5. Motivation : Struggling readers often lack motivation to read. Educators should drive motivation to support success.

Consider these Questions: Do you have experience using narrative and expository text in the classroom? Please explain. Why do you feel adolescent literacy instruction is so important? Is there an area of literacy instruction you believe is most important, or perhaps most influential on reading success?