Overview of Chapter 6

            by Jeff Sapp

    There is a sense of crisis among secondary educators.  Class sizes are huge, reading specialists at the secondary level are few and far between, high school students are being threatened with exit exams, and violence is as prevalent in rural Kentucky as it is in urban San Diego.  Concerns about reading and literacy are beginning to emerge more and more in the field of education.  What are the best practices to assist struggling readers and writers who have reached adolescence?

    Peggy Farber’s article has an all-too-familiar title - “Johnny Still Can’t Read.”  The statistics are shocking:  just 6% of American 17-year-olds read at what is considered an advanced level; 60% of adolescents do not read well enough to manage a typical high school textbook.  Farmer and other researchers suggest what can be done to solve this growing problem.

    Lesley Rex’s research considers how to successfully integrate students who have been ability tracked into classrooms with more demanding academic expectations.  How can these students be encouraged to reenvision their identities?  Her article considers how students navigate the process of transforming their own identities and what teachers can do pedagogically to facilitate this.

    Patricia Anders reveals some of the newest and most innovative strategies for teaching reading at the secondary level.  The major trend reaffirms what authors of articles in the previous chapter on critical literacy say - that secondary reading is shifting away from the narrow use of textbooks toward adolescents’ reading and writing about their own worlds.  The use of popular culture, politics, and critical media literacy are a few of the topics discussed.

    The National Research Center on English Learning and Achievement produced Guidelines for Teaching Middle and High School Students to Read and Write Well.  Contributing authors identified six features that assist adolescents in literacy.  This work not only defines these features, but also gives tangible activities that classroom educators can use to aid students in becoming successful readers and writers.

    Vicki Jacob’s article considers what secondary teachers can do to teach reading.  Content area literacy is the ability to read, write, talk, and listen to learn subject matter across the curriculum.  Jacobs offers a three-step strategy involving pre-reading, guided reading, and post-reading that is easy to incorporate into an educator’s repertoire.

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