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Adolescent Literacy
Middle school restructures to support struggling readers
For years, Mary Manning, principal of the Collins Middle School in Salem Massachusetts,
has seen children come into her school unable to read at grade level. After three years, many failed to catch up before moving
on to high school. “After a few years of saying ‘isn’t this terrible,’ and wringing our hands, we
decided to get some training and see if we could tackle this problem,” says Manning.
Determined to make improved literacy skills the focus of a schoolwide improvement effort, Manning assembled a Reading Improvement
Team that includes staff from every department across the school. Under her leadership, the school is collaborating with EDC’s
Supported Literacy™ program leaders on a schoolwide effort to address literacy at all levels, with a special emphasis
on the most challenged readers.
Mary Manning is not alone. Across the country middle school administrators and teachers have been confronting the fact
that significant numbers of their students cannot read well enough to meet increasingly rigorous high school subject matter
and graduation requirements. In fact, results from the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress show that only
about a third of adolescents across the country are reading at a proficient level.
“This is not a new problem,” says Catherine Cobb Morocco, associate director of EDC’s Center for Family, School, and Community and a leader of the Supported Literacy team. “Teachers have always known about this group of struggling adolescent
readers. But with the new federal testing requirements it is plain for everyone to see exactly who is and is not reading.”
The groups most at risk for reading failure are the same groups at risk for school failure in general: students with disabilities,
English language learners, and students who live in poverty. “The students who struggle with reading are struggling
in their other classes as well,” says EDC’s Andrea Winokur Kotula, who works closely with the staff at Collins.
“The math teachers, the science teachers, everyone knows who the poor readers are—they are their students too.”
Supported Literacy provides two levels of instructional support for literacy: classroom comprehension instruction for all
students and additional, targeted reading instruction for students whose standardized reading test scores are below the 25th
percentile. The schoolwide classroom level prepares teachers to improve all students’ reading, writing, and discussion
skills as they work with complex texts. The program and materials emphasize integrating comprehension and writing skills into
thematic curriculum units with diverse and age-appropriate themes. A major focus of the program is developing student ability
to support an interpretation of text with evidence, an outcome emphasized in content area assessments.
While developing the Supported Literacy approach in partnership with diverse schools across the country, Morocco and her
colleagues discovered that despite the best efforts of accomplished teachers and the EDC team, there remained a certain segment
of students who could not read well enough to participate in a program based on comprehension and interpretation.
Targeted instruction for struggling readers
In response, Morocco and her team expanded Supported Literacy to address the particular needs of the most challenged readers.
This supplementary, targeted reading instruction draws on the best of research-based approaches to reading instruction and
adapts them for adolescent learners. It focuses on foundation reading skills such as phonemic awareness, decoding, word identification,
fluency, and comprehension strategies. For the last two years Kotula has been piloting the program at the Collins Middle School
with sixth and seventh grade students with reading test scores below the 25th percentile. There are currently forty-one sixth
graders and thirty-eight seventh graders participating in the program.
“The instruction is evidence-based, explicit, and teacher-directed,” says Kotula. The program is also carefully
coordinated with the rest of the Supported Literacy curriculum so students in the program do not miss out on other core aspects
of their language arts instruction.
Students in the targeted program meet in small groups for a forty-minute period of intensive reading instruction every
day. Each period begins with a 5-10 minute session on phonemic awareness, or the understanding that words are made up of individual
sounds that can be manipulated in different ways. This work involves isolating initial word sounds, blending sounds, segmenting
words into individual sounds, and manipulating sounds by adding, dropping, or substituting them. Students also work with letter
tiles so they can manually use letters to build words and manipulate different sounds within them. “They might change
lope to cope, for instance,” says Kotula. “We try to use low frequency words like these to make the work more
challenging for older students. Initially students say things like, ‘Why are we doing this baby stuff?’ But during
the course of the year they come to enjoy it very much—they can master this work, succeed at it, and have fun.”
In addition to building phonemic awareness, students are taught how to decode words—to use letter-sound associations
and common spelling patterns to identify unfamiliar words. They practice this new knowledge by reading and writing words and
sentences that contain the elements they have learned and by reading similarly constructed passages.
Next the students memorize “sight words.” Drawing from a list of the 3,000 most frequently used words in print,
teachers introduce students to 3 new words a day so they learn to identify high frequency words, building their vocabularies
and aiding in their fluency as readers. “We pretest them on these words to learn what they do and do not recognize,
then we build up their repertoire from there,” explains Kotula.
At the end of each period the teacher and students read aloud from chapter books written specifically for struggling middle
school readers. Known as “high interest, low vocabulary,” books, they speak to adolescent issues and concerns
in a format that beginning readers can master. Though silent reading is the ultimate goal, students in the targeted instruction
groups read aloud so that the teachers can identify weak areas and help as needed. Teachers also model fluency by taking turns
during the oral reading. “Reading aloud is important at this stage because once students start falling behind in reading,
they try to compensate by guessing at words, so teachers need to hear them to monitor their needs and help when they get stuck,”
explains Kotula.
The chapter books proved so popular with the students that last year the Collins Middle School staff and teachers raised
money to purchase two books for each student in the program to take home with them over the summer. “The idea was that
they would continue to read aloud to a parent or sibling while school was out,” says Kotula. “We also wanted them
to experience the pleasure of owning some books that they love.”
The goal for the targeted reading instruction is to have all students reading in the average range by the end of seventh
grade. At the end of the first year of the program, test results indicated that on average, students made big gains in phonemic
awareness, but not yet in the other areas of reading development. Over the summer, teachers and staff planned for the second
year. After reviewing the test results and interviewing the teachers, the EDC team modified the program to give more emphasis
to the other components of reading. At the end of April this year, all participants will be post-tested and Kotula is hopeful
that they will show similar gains in the other areas.
“The reflection time this summer was a good thing,” says Manning. “It gave everyone time to restructure.
It is great having a staff that is flexible and willing to work together to achieve improvement.”
Kotula has also noticed an unusual degree of commitment across the entire staff in the literacy effort, a phenomenon she
attributes to Mary Manning’s leadership and the Reading Improvement Team. “Middle schools are not an easy environment
in which to provide intensive reading instruction because generally they are not set up for small group learning,” explains
Kotula. “School staff really want to help the poorest readers, but when you explain what it takes to make it happen,
they often think they can’t find the staff or the time. I have come to realize that what it takes is strong leadership
at the top and a schoolwide commitment to all students.”
For more information please contact Catherine Cobb Morocco or visit the Literacy Matters Web site.
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