What Content-Area Teachers Should Know About Adolescent Literacy

The goal of this report is to help address middle and high school classroom teachers’, administrators’, and parents’ immediate need for basic information about how to build adolescents’ reading and writing skills. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the U.S. Department of Education, and other organizations currently sponsor long-term research studies that ultimately will add to our knowledge of adolescent literacy. In the meantime, however, the need for information to use in the classroom must be met.

This report summarizes some of the current literature on adolescent literacy research and practice. It is not a research synthesis or a literature review; such an effort is well beyond the scope of this document. Rather the report suggests some methods of building adolescent reading and writing skills in the classroom. To the extent possible, recommendations are evidence-based. There is little published literature on the effectiveness of instructional approaches or programs for adolescents, and the results from some new effectiveness research, now in press, were not available during the development of this report. With the limited research base available, research on other groups such as younger readers, dyslexic readers, and adult beginning readers have informed the recommendations made in this document. Extrapolating from this research does not negate the need or import of research investigating the effectiveness of instructional approaches or programs for adolescent, but rather provides useful guidance that can inform what instructors do today.