Literacy strategies at the secondary level.

There is help for educators who want to turn struggling readers into proficient readers.

Whenever I pick up a newspaper, the headlines shriek the bad news: "California Lags behind Other States in Reading and Math!"

"California Students Are Not Prepared to Pass the Exit Exams in 2004!"

"Can California High School Students Meet the New Standards?"

Is it all true? And faced with the looming specter of exit exams and mounting political pressure to fix the problems, what can administrators do about it?

In an effort to answer to the first question, at the beginning of the school year I ask my high school students to fill out a literacy survey, promising extra credit points in exchange for complete candor. I say reassuringly, "Don't tell me what you think I want to hear. There are no correct answers to these questions, and your points will be the same regardless of what you say."

For the next 15 minutes, all I hear is the sound of pens and pencils scratching on paper as students struggle to candidly answer questions such as, "What is reading? How did you learn to read? What do you do when you come to a word, phrase or concept you don't understand? Do you usually read your history/science/math textbook assignments? If not, how do you pass the tests? What's the best book you've read lately? How do you feel about reading?"

I leave plenty of room after each question for students to respond, and I carefully read everything they have to say. Their answers will tell me to what extent I must incorporate literacy lessons into my regular English curriculum: reading, writing, listening, speaking and thinking.

The results are not reassuring. Poor readers define reading in terms that show little basic understanding of the reading process, or of what people actually do when they read. Common responses include: "Reading is spelling the words," "... figuring out the words" and "... spelling the letters."

They have it partly right -- cracking the alphabetic code is crucial to learning to read, but few students, in their definition of reading, think beyond decoding to include comprehension, or meaning-making.

Responses to the question, "How did you learn to read?" are equally vague. "I don't remember, I just did," is common, as is, "My teacher taught me the alphabet and I put the words together after that." Students simply don't mention the learning of reading comprehension strategies.

It comes as no surprise to find that students with a nebulous concept of what reading is, and who do not recall how they learned to read, report poor memory when they read and frustration, ignorance and confusion when they come to something in the text they do not comprehend.

"I can read the words, but I can't remember them!"

"I just skip it and go on!"

"I don't have a clue what to do."

Students report feelings of frustration, anger and sadness about their inability to understand what they read, especially informational text, the backbone of content area textbooks. What they lack is metacognitive knowledge and comprehension monitoring (Goudvis & Harvey, 2000); the ability to recognize when reading comprehension breaks down and draw from a repertoire of comprehension strategies to move beyond the problem.

The respondents to my reading surveys are frustrated and underprepared readers. They own very few books, do not use the public or school libraries, not only cannot name the title of a "favorite" book but possibly have never finished a book in their lives, and would rather do anything rather than read. Sadly, the students in my English classes are also struggling in every one of their other classes -- social studies, the sciences, mathematics and often electives.

Which brings us to homework and content area textbook reading assignments. Shocking as it sounds, of the two senior classes I most recently surveyed, only eight students out of 40 reported that they regularly read their content area textbooks.

When I asked how they pass the tests, they reported the following strategies:

"I copy from a friend."

"I skim the text for the answers to the questions, but I don't actually read it."

"I wait until the next day and listen to the teacher tell us what was in the chapter."

It's clear that most of my students won't or can't read their textbooks, so they resort to a variety of creative -- albeit sometimes nefarious -- strategies that do not include reading. Interestingly, though often the fault partly lies with inconsiderate text, students rarely think about that as a possible reason for their failure to comprehend the material. They are so used to not understanding expository text, they think it is normal and blame themselves.

I think we can agree that the problem is real. What can we do about it? First we must acknowledge that it cannot all be fixed in the English classroom; placing the blame for students' reading problems at the feet of elementary school teachers and the solution strictly in the hands of English teachers simply will not work.

For the last 10 years, in addition to teaching high school English, I've been a teacher educator who teaches content area reading to secondary credential candidates. I also direct and facilitate Struggling Reader Institutes for the California Reading & Literature Project. I am dedicated to providing hands-on professional development and sustained follow-up to enable content area teachers to become teachers of literacy.

All of this work, as well as my extensive research into the subject, has led me to one inescapable conclusion. In order for underperforming students to become higher-level, strategic readers who will be able pass the upcoming California High School Exit Exam, all secondary teachers, no matter what their content areas, must incorporate the teaching of reading comprehension strategies into their regular curriculum.

I can hear the cries of outrage ringing through middle and high school hallways from one end of California to the other. "With everything else we're supposed to cover, we should teach reading too? They should have learned to read in elementary school!" You've heard them too.

Getting results

There are two essential elements to the process. First, teachers must be given workable and realistic strategies and experience those strategies in operation, and secondly (and this is most often the part that is omitted), they must receive ongoing support and encouragement in actually putting these strategies into practice.

You cannot expect to get results by simply sending your teachers to a one-shot seminar, no matter how well-presented, if you do not reinforce it with regular follow-up sessions where they can share their experiences and learn from each other.

The state of California supports this philosophy. The governor's office allocated millions of dollars (through the California Professional Development Reform lnitiative/CPDRl) for California high school teachers to attend 40-hour reading institutes last summer, with follow-up sessions totaling another 120 hours during this school year. Teachers are receiving stipends of $1,000 for their attendance and participation in the program.

Until fairly recently, literacy in kindergarten through grade six has been at the forefront of these initiatives. Thankfully, literacy development at the secondary level has become a critical concern we are trying to address through professional development and follow-up. What follows is a brief look at some of the literacy strategies content area CPDRI 9-12 teachers are learning to use in their classrooms.

Teachers are first taught to examine the strategies they themselves use to understand text in their content areas, and then explicitly and systematically teach students those strategies. For example, proficient readers:

* Think about what they already know about a topic and relate it to the text.

* Set purposes for reading.

* Use text features (titles, bold print, italics, sidebars, photos, drawings and graphs) to predict what the reading will be about.

* Determine the genre and adjust their reading stance accordingly.

* Question, predict, summarize and clarify difficult words, phrases and ideas.

* Make text-to-text, text-to-self, text-to-world connections.

* Understand how different pieces of information fit together.

* Are able to discern salient information from extraneous material.

* Recognize when comprehension breaks down and stop to fix the problem.

Metacognitive awareness

A good place to start is for teachers to build on their own metacognitive awareness. "Becoming aware of your own reading processes is the essential first step in helping students focus on how they read and, therefore, on their ongoing development as successful discipline-specific readers" (Schoenbach, et al., 1999).

Content area teachers who also teach reading must ask themselves two important questions about their own reading processes: How did I make sense of the text? What is hidden here that I need to point out to my students?

According to Ruth Schoenbach, one of the authors of "Reading for Understanding: A Guide to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms," a good way to do this is for teachers to enter into reading partnerships with students; teachers become mentor readers and students become apprentice readers. It's the reading mentor's job to demonstrate to students that reading comprehension doesn't "just magically happen" by providing a window into a proficient reader's mind as she grapples with difficult text. Schoenbach calls this "making the invisible visible" (Schoenbach, et al., 1999).

Think Aloud for Monitoring

This process is useful for showing students the kinds of thought processes good readers use to monitor their reading comprehension. Remember -- on their reading surveys, my struggling readers readily admit to not understanding the kinds of questions and prompts that good readers use as they read, so teachers need to explicitly and systematically model them. Here's an important strategy we model for teachers in our institutes:

1. Select a paragraph from the content area textbook currently in use. Choose a fairly difficult passage; one with unknown vocabulary, ambiguous language and complex ideas.

2. Tell students you're going to invite them into your mind as you read a difficult passage from the textbook.

3. Read the passage aloud while students follow along in their textbooks. As you read, explain to students what you're doing to make sense of the reading. If you have questions, ask them and attempt to answer. If you don't understand a word, guess its meaning in context. If you are confused about a concept, ask the author questions. Predict what you think is coming next. Argue with the author. Summarize the passage after you've finished.

4. After you've modeled the think-aloud strategy, discuss the process with the class. Then give them time to practice in pairs, continuing with the text you've started. Don't just do this once and forget about it. "Encourage students to use Think Aloud for Monitoring regularly with various texts as they read independently" (Lenski, Wham & Johns, 1999) and in time, they will become readers who automatically interact with the text.

Schema building

Many frustrated and struggling readers, especially English Language Learners, come to a reading in content area textbooks without any prior knowledge or previous experience of the topic. If they do have some prior knowledge, students often do not know how to access it. "By accessing their background knowledge, or schema, students can create a frame of reference for what they are about to read" (Anderson & Pearson, 1984).

Reciprocal teaching strategies

As I said earlier, proficient readers subconsciously conduct a running dialogue with the text as they try to make sense of difficult concepts. If they don't understand, they question, predict, summarize and clarify until meaning becomes clear. Struggling readers need to be explicitly and systematically taught these skills.

Developed by Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar and Ann L. Brown, reciprocal teaching takes the form of a dialogue or discussion about text between the teacher and the students, using summarizing, questioning, predicting and clarifying strategies in reading for meaning (Brown & Palincsar, 1982).

Students practice using each strategy for five consecutive days. After 20 days the teacher gradually gives over the responsibility of initiating the discussion to the students. Eventually, students internalize the four strategies and can easily (1) identify and integrate the most important information in the text, (2) generate questions about the text at many levels, (3) use text features to hypothesize what the author will discuss in the text and set a purpose for reading -- to confirm or disprove their hypotheses, and (4) discern where the difficulties in a text lie -- unfamiliar or unknown vocabulary, difficult or unclear concepts -- and take the necessary steps to restore meaning (refer to a dictionary, ask for help, reread). Reciprocal teaching strategies can be taught in all content areas and incorporated into the regular curriculum.

Building fluency

Proficient readers are fluent readers; they read smoothly and with comprehension. The main road to building fluency is to offer struggling readers many reading/writing opportunities to experience the thoughts, vocabularies and ideas of the content area.

Preparing read-alouds for the class, participating in regular free independent reading sessions, buddy reading, creating audio tapes of readings for younger students, writing and reading informational picture books for an elementary audience, keeping subject matter learning logs and sharing them with classmates are all strategies for building fluency. The more students read, the more fluent they will become.

A very important point: during free reading periods, teachers should drop everything and read!

Professional development

The success or failure of turning frustrated, underprepared readers into proficient readers depends largely on how well teachers "understand and can articulate and demonstrate their craft, in this case, making sense of text" (Schoenbach, et al., 1999). They must also explicitly and systematically teach reading comprehension strategies, gracefully weaving them into content area curriculum.

To accomplish these challenges, ongoing professional development is crucial to helping teachers develop the necessary expertise. In an article like this I can only give you a tiny taste of the wealth of information presented in the California Professional Development Reform Initiative and other California Reading & Literature Project institutes. Your teachers will return with a good grounding in reading issues and how they affect secondary students. More importantly, they can look forward to year-long opportunities to come together again and discuss their progress and their disappointments, learn from each others' experiences, and re-energize their commitment to helping their students read and understand their textbooks.

Let us end by reminding ourselves that reading is the fundamental skill upon which all learning depends in today's world, and the written word is becoming more pervasive every year. But let us not see it as a hill we must climb or a battle we must win. Let us see it as seeds we must plant and nurture in our students' minds. And the first step is to plant those seeds in the minds of the teachers.

For more information about the California Professional Development Reform Initiative, call the California Reading & Literature Project at Sonoma State University at [phone] or [phone].

References

Anderson, R.C. & Pearson, P.D. (1984). "A schema-theoretic view of basic processes in reading comprehension." In P.D. Pearson (Ed.) Handbook of reading research. New York: Longman.

Brown, Ann L.; Palincsar, Annemarie Sullivan & Armbruster, Bonnie B. (1984). "Instructing comprehension-fostering activities in interactive learning." In H. Mandl, N. Stein, & T. Trabasso (Eds.) Learning and Comprehension of Text. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Harvey, Stephanie & Goudvis, Anne. (2000). Strategies That Work: Teaching Comprehension to Enhance Understanding. York, Maine: Stenhouse Publishers.

Lenski, Susan Davis; Wham, Mary Ann & Johns, Jerry L. (1999). Reading & Learning Strategies for Middle & High School Students. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co.

Schoenbach, Ruth; Greenleaf, Cynthia; Cziko, Christine & Hurwitz, Lori (1999). Reading for Understanding: A Guide to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Adrienne Rose is a reading specialist and has been a high school English teacher for 20 years. She is currently working with the California Reading & Literature Project as co-director of the California Professional Development Reform Initiative 9-12 institutes. She also teaches reading in the content area to credential candidates at San Francisco State University.