July/August 1999

Johnny Still Can't Read?

Why high school students aren't developing the reading skills they need-and what some researchers suggest to solve this growing problem

By Peggy J. Farber

Each fall, Anna Lobianco, a reading specialist at Bread and Roses Integrated Arts High School in New York City, gives a reading test to the 90 incoming 9th-graders. As part of the assessment, she interviews the students about their attitudes toward reading and how they handle problems that arise while reading.

"I get the exact same responses from kids every year," says Lobianco. "They hate reading. It's just a labor." Of the students Lobianco screens, almost one-third are identified for inclusion in her remedial reading class.

"A question I always ask kids is what do you do when you come to a word you don't know," she continues. "They all say the same thing: 'I look it up in the dictionary.' They don't have any [other] strategies for reading. They don't have the 'skip it, try to figure it out and come back to it later' type strategies."

Lobianco's observations are echoed by results of the 1998 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in reading, released in March by the U.S. Department of Education. The new survey shows that although virtually all adolescents are able to carry out simple reading tasks, only 40 percent can read well enough to comfortably manage standard high school texts.

Only 6 percent of American 17-year-olds read at what NAEP designers deem an advanced level-that is, can synthesize and learn from specialized reading material. That age group is the only one showing lower scores today than when the NAEP was first given in 1971, which begs the question, Why are the reading skills of older students not showing more improvement?

While the nation has concentrated much needed attention on beginning readers, efforts to help high school students are lagging. Fewer high schools today have reading support staff-like Lobianco-than at any time in the past to instruct students in advanced reading processes. In fact, experts say that secondary teachers should just assume that most of their students cannot read at grade level. In practical terms, they say, this means that high school teachers will have to train students in reading at the same time they teach content.

That challenge is especially formidible considering the fact that high schoolers with reading problems may have gotten sidetracked at different stages in their development. According to Catherine Snow, professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, some older students struggle because they failed to learn fundamentals of reading in the primary grades, whereas others were competent readers early on but never progressed in fluency and comprehension sufficiently to read the texts encountered after 4th grade.

Still others developed reading skills up to, say, a 6th- or 8th-grade level, but haven't actually read enough to develop the vocabulary or general knowledge that more advanced reading requires. Although most high schoolers may be able to read the words on the page, many do not have the skills that allow them to synthesize or summarize information, draw conclusions, make generalizations, or relate information drawn from texts to their own knowledge.

Secondary school students are expected to learn independently from print, but no one shows them how, says Arlene Barry, an assistant professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Kansas. "We start to work with kids on stories from the time they're infants. We read stories to them, and they know the pattern: there's going to be an ending and a resolution. The kind of texts kids are reading at higher levels-the informational, technical texts-there are patterns in them, too, but the kids are not aware of that and nobody walks them through it."

Common Mistakes

Mature readers might find it perplexing that adolescents fail to stop reading and take stock when they become confused, but reading specialists report that this is one of the most common mistakes young adults make. "Teachers don't realize that kids can read something and say the words okay, but not understand what they've read-and not even know they don't understand," Barry says.

In secondary school, teaching shifts from the process of learning to the content students should learn, leaving teachers with little time to address reading. Even teachers who know how to teach reading in their content areas rarely do so. Thirty-seven states require secondary school teachers to take at least one course in reading, yet studies show that only a small percentage of teachers actually use the strategies they learn. And recent state trends are making it tougher for teachers to stray from content instruction. Thirteen states have recently instituted exit exams that require students to meet high standards that emphasize content knowledge, and more states are in the process of rolling out such exams.

"Teaching adolescent literacy is not supported from the top down," says Richard Vacca, former president of the International Reading Association and co-author of a respected textbook on secondary school reading. "The only thing that's important is a score on a state proficiency test, and that's content driven."

Harvard lecturer Vicki Jacobs says secondary school teachers who neglect to address literacy explicitly may be adding to the problem by sending students an inaccurate message about how mature reading works. "If I say to students, 'Go home and read a book chapter and come back tomorrow and I'll give you a quiz,'" says Jacobs, "then I'm implying that good reading is like a fairy landing on your shoulder and you just get it. I'm not showing you how to tangle with the text, how to construct meaning."

Reading experts say another factor is the public's misperceptions about literacy. Across the states, governors and legislatures pour public resources into intervention programs for young children and fail to fund any literacy programs for secondary students. Their mistake: assuming that reading develops automatically once a child masters the fundamentals.

"We're seduced by this notion that if we could just teach the basics by 4th grade, kids would be able to handle the complex demands of literacy that are required of middle and high school students, and that's just not going to happen," Richard Vacca says. "We have 30 years of statistics that show the problem isn't only with beginning literacy, yet we front load everything and then the funding just stops."

Thinking About Thinking

There is a considerable body of experimental research demonstrating that when adolescent students are shown how to monitor their own thinking, they are able to get more from their texts and to perform more complicated operations with the information. Thinking about thinking-or metacognition- is a hallmark of early adolescent development and the backbone of adolescent reading experiments. Several experimental regimens train students to think while they read. However, little work has been done to move these protocols out of laboratories and into secondary classrooms,

One model that has been tried in classrooms and is favored by several reading experts is reciprocal teaching. Developed in the early 1980s by researchers Ann Brown and Annemarie Palincsar, this approach has content-area teachers engage students in a dialogue (thus, reciprocal) that employs four thinking strategies: generating questions based on what the students already know, predicting what is about to happen in the text, summarizing what students have just read, and stopping to clarify when students hit confusing material.

Another effort gets teachers themselves to think about how they read and then try to pass those skills on to kids. Cynthia Greenleaf, director of research at the San Francisco-based WestEd's Strategic Literacy Initiative, and her colleague, Ruth Schoenbach, are collaborating with secondary school teachers to bring insights from cognitive research into classrooms. Greenleaf says the first step in her work with high school teachers is always to get them to recognize what they do when they read.

"We have groups of social studies teachers sit together and read a history analysis, and chemistry teachers read a Scientific American article," Greenleaf says. "And we have them list their reading moves-what they pay attention to." Inevitably, teachers discover that advanced reading in one discipline is nothing like it is in another. Teachers need to uncover such hidden, or veiled, processess and make them apparent to students, says Greenleaf. "We need to try to figure out ways of helping our kids into that masked world of how you do literary readings, science readings, historical readings," she says.

Next Greenleaf and Schoenbach introduce teachers to research-based techniques such as reciprocal teaching that help students expand their repertoire of thinking strategies and develop flexibility in using them. They also urge teachers to make use of the developmental strengths of adolescents.

At Thurgood Marshall Academic High School in San Francisco, Greenleaf and Schoenbach developed a mandatory literacy course for all incoming 9th-graders in 1996 that emphasizes adolescents' emerging abilities to think about thinking and to be retrospective about themselves. In the first unit, "Reading Self and Society," students explore their own "reading identities," including their histories as readers and what kind of problems they have experienced, as well as what kind of role reading will likely play in their intended career goals.

During the course, which met for two 90-minute block periods and one 50-minute period per week, students also read narratives from authors such as Malcolm X, Claude Brown, Frederick Douglass, and others. They read silently in class for 20 to 25 minutes each block period, kept logs describing the reading problems they encountered, and got explicit instruction in self-help cognitive strategies, such as predicting, questioning, and clarifying.

At the end of the 1996-97 academic year, students showed significant gains in reading achievement, moving from the 47th to the 50th percentile in national ranking. Furthermore, when the same students were tested again at the end of 10th grade, a year after the course had ended, their gains not only held but even accelerated. By the spring of 1998 the group had gained approximately four years' reading ability in two academic years.

More significantly, perhaps, is that students' perceptions about reading, as measured by open-ended surveys conducted at the beginning and end of the year, changed dramatically. More students reported that they liked reading, that they purposefully decided which books to read, had favorite authors, and understood what they read.

Explaining the results of her work with the San Francisco 9th-grade teachers, Greenleaf voices a complaint heard repeatedly in conversations with literacy experts. "This is exactly why we need to do the work at the secondary level," she says, "why we can't just say, 'Oh, the kids got it in K through 3, they know how to decode and they know how to approach words that are unfamiliar, and how to chunk text and read fluently.' That is not enough."

Peggy J. Farber is a freelance education reporter based in New York City.

For Further Information

Boys Town Reading Center, Father Flanagan's Boys' Home, Boys Town, Nebraska 68010; 402-498-1155.

M.E. Curtis and A.M. Longo. When Adolescents Can't Read: Methods and Materials that Work. Cambridge, MA: Brookline Books, 1999.

C. Cziko. "Reading Happens in Your Mind, Not Your Mouth." California English 3, no. 4 (Summer 1998): 6-7.

P. Donahue, K. Voelkl, J. Campbell, and J. Mazzeo. NAEP 1998 Reading Report Card for the Nation and the States. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, March 1999.

Guide to the Reading Wars, a collection of documents and articles on the MiddleWeb site. Funded by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, MiddleWeb provides information on middle school reform.

D. G. O'Brien, R. A. Stewart, and E.B. Moje. "Why Content Literacy Is Difficult to Infuse into the Secondary School: Complexities of Curriculum, Pedagogy, and School Culture." Reading Research Quarterly 30, no. 3 (July/August/ September 1995): 442-463.

Project WebSIGHT provides a practical introduction to reciprocal teaching, and includes sample lessons and research results. The site was created by the Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the University of Miami, and the Florida Department of Education. .

The Strategic Literacy Initiative, WestEd, 730 Harrison Street, San Francisco, CA 94107; 415-565-3000; ; send e-mail to Ruth Schoenbach or Cynthia Greenleaf.

R.T. Vacca. "Let's Not Marginalize Adolescent Literacy." Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 41, no. 8 (May 1998): 604-609.