Middle Schools With Content Material

¶ … Middle Schools With Content Material

Identifying and Resolving Reading Problems in Middle Schools with Content Material

When something is made a priority, it is by definition supposed to get better. Alas, this has not been the case with initiatives intended to improve adolescent literacy rates in recent years, and despite legislation such as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), many students are in fact being left behind because of poor reading skills. According to Conley and Hinchman (2004), "As America enters the 21st Century full of hope and promise, too many of our neediest students are being left behind" (p. 42). Good reading skills are important in achieving academic success in virtually every subject. Unfortunately, many middle schools students today continue to experience problems in achieving the required levels of literacy due in large part to difficulties comprehending the material in social studies text because they do not possess the requisite skills such as background reading or the motivation to understand what they are reading. This paper provides an overview of the issues involved and the extent of the problem, as well as some useful teaching strategies that can be used to help these students develop good reading skills in the content area. A summary of the research and salient findings will be provided in the conclusion.

Review and Discussion

The growing body of research into adolescent literacy has examined a wide range of potentially contributing factors including multiple literacies; personal identity issues; the influence of race, gender, and ethnicity; teaching and learning beliefs and practices; and the roles of text and context (Conley & Hinchman 42). In spite of this body of knowledge, there remains a dearth of timely studies concerning what can be done to improve the literacy rate among adolescent students today. As a result, the Alliance for Excellent Education (AEE) (2006) emphasizes that, "Without a focus on literacy instruction at the secondary school level, many students are left to drift, often faking their way through high school reading assignments" (Jobs for the 21st Century 2). The AEE cites the following alarming statistics in this regard:

More than 8 million students in grades 4-12 read below grade level;

Only 31% of America's eighth grade students and approximately the same percentage of 12th graders -- meet the National Assessment of Educational Progress standard of reading "proficiency" for their grade level;

Among low-income eighth graders, just 15% read at a proficient level;

In a typical high-poverty urban school, about half of incoming 9th-grade students read at the 6th- or 7th-grade level;

Just 3% of all 8th graders read at an advanced level;

High school students' ability to read complex texts is strongly predictive of their performance in college math and science courses;

Between 1971 and 2004, the reading levels of America's 17-year-olds showed no improvement at all;

On average, African-American and Hispanic high school seniors read at the same level as white 8th-grade students; and,

The 25 fastest-growing professions have far greater than average literacy demands, while the fastest-declining professions have lower than average literacy demands (AEE Fact Sheet 2006:1-3).

There are some teaching strategies available that have been shown to generally improve student interest and motivation to improve their reading abilities and comprehension levels; however, because every student is unique, these strategies should be used as a guide rather than a cookbook in developing and fine-tuning teaching strategies for a given class. In this regard, Conley and Hinchman (2004) recommend that the following teaching strategies to help improve literary rates in middle school and beyond:

Continuous reading instruction with an emphasis on developing strategic knowledge for dealing with unknown words and comprehension; improving adolescent literacy rates requires reading instruction that continues in content areas across grades, especially as adolescents are required to read more demanding materials while responding to increasingly complex tasks and studies have confirmed the importance of direct and incidental vocabulary development (and teaching comprehension) through activating prior knowledge, determining importance, imagery, and summarization, across age groups.

Develop students' strategic understandings of how they read. "Not only do adolescents need to work on developing comprehension, but they must also understand where, when, and how to apply varied comprehension strategies" (42). The authors also emphasize the uniqueness of each student and the need for fine-tuning such strategies to the individual student and suggest that, "One of the joys of working with adolescents is that they can contribute immeasurably to diagnoses of their literacy-related needs. Recent work suggests that individual teenagers can recognize the sources of their difficulties and, from this recognition, can learn to strategize and move forward to the reading of increasingly complex texts" (43). This strategy has also been shown to help adolescent self-esteem and efficacy.