With all the progress made in reading, why is adolescent literacy still a problem?
Most of the progress, and 85 percent of the research that’s been done, has been on getting kids to read well by third grade. That research has been enormously valuable and the quality of the instruction that goes on in early elementary classrooms has benefited. But it is a mistake to think that students who read at a third grade level can, without scaffolding and additional instruction, tackle more complex texts. For the majority, the challenges are just too great. If they don’t have strong oral language skills, if they are just managing with the reading but their exposure to oral English is limited, or if they come from homes where they are spending all of their time watching television and none of their time talking to adults and reading books, then they have not developed the capacities that they are going to need for comprehension. If a student is reading a year below grade level by sixth grade, he’s going to slip farther and farther behind. A student who is three or four years bel
