Get Ready for Middle and High School Reading
Is your middle school student ready for the demands of high school reading? Here are the tools she'll need to succeed.
In elementary school, teachers focus on teaching basic reading skills as students progress from learning to read to reading to learn. As they advance through middle school and beyond, students need to develop more sophisticated reading skills that include interpreting, analyzing and discussing texts. But just when many students reach the point where they need instruction in these skills, teachers are concentrating on course content rather than reading skills. Here are the skills your child will need to succeed and advice for how to help.
Moving Up From Basic Reading Skills
Middle and high school students move from class to class, and the skills required differ, depending on the subject. Science, social studies and English each have their own vocabulary and structure, and students must move from the basic skills of sounding out words and understanding plot to reading longer and more complex texts that require gathering, analyzing, interpreting and responding to information. According to "Why the Crisis in Adolescent Literacy Demands a National Response," a report from the Alliance for Excellent Education: "To succeed in high school and beyond, students must become chameleons, able to adapt to a range of academic contexts, each of which requires its own set of literacy skills."
A Literacy Crisis
While most of the emphasis in classrooms across the country has been on making sure all students learn to read by third grade, national tests reveal a literacy crisis at the middle and high school levels. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), more than two-thirds of all eighth-graders read below grade level and half of those students score below the most basic level. There are more than 6 million students in middle and high school classified as struggling readers. Lacking basic reading skills, many of them are at a high risk of becoming high school dropouts.
While most of the emphasis in classrooms across the country has been on making sure all students learn to read by third grade, national tests reveal a literacy crisis at the middle and high school levels. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), more than two-thirds of all eighth-graders read below grade level and half of those students score below the most basic level. There are more than 6 million students in middle and high school classified as struggling readers. Lacking basic reading skills, many of them are at a high risk of becoming high school dropouts.
Middle-Schoolers Need to Learn Reading Skills, Too
These frightening statistics have led educators to realize that teaching reading doesn't end at third grade. They have a two-fold task: making sure all students achieve the basics of reading but also making sure students go beyond the basics to learn complex reading skills.
These frightening statistics have led educators to realize that teaching reading doesn't end at third grade. They have a two-fold task: making sure all students achieve the basics of reading but also making sure students go beyond the basics to learn complex reading skills.
At the higher school levels, teachers may feel pressure to cover a certain amount of the curriculum in their content area and may not feel it is their responsibility to teach reading skills. But students who are not developing complex reading skills may find it difficult or impossible to understand the subjects they are studying. Middle and high school administrators who are concerned about addressing this problem are putting programs into place that include after-school tutoring, literacy coaching and reading skills instruction for teachers.
If you suspect your middle school student is having trouble with reading, ask her to summarize a chapter or tell you in her own words about what she just read. If she has difficulty, don't delay in seeking help from a teacher or counselor, and find out what support your school or community offers for struggling readers.
What Reading Skills Do Middle and High School Students Need to Learn?
As students move through middle and high school, they put aside basic readers and stories and move on to more difficult, content-rich materials including novels, plays, textbooks, laboratory manuals and technical texts. In science classes, students must learn how to read and write laboratory reports, while in history classes they must interpret historical documents and understand biographical information.
"They move from understanding plot when they start out in sixth grade to character development and on to 'motifs' in high school," says Lance Balla, a high school English teacher for 15 years in Bellevue, WA, and consultant for the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and the College Board. "They move from understanding the story in middle school to understanding the author's vision in high school. For example, a ninth-grader might read Romeo and Juliet and learn about it as a love story, and concentrate on the characters. In later years in high school they might look at what was Shakespeare's vision of love and how do you agree or disagree with his vision, how is Shakespeare's vision of love different from another author's? They might look at a concept and how different texts address it, for example, the idea of justice in Crime and Punishment vs. Hamlet."
In the upper grades, reading skills and content knowledge become intertwined. Students must develop sophisticated reading and writing skills along the way in order to fully understand the content of their courses. They must learn to use cues from the text such as tables, diagrams and questions at the end of the chapter. They must learn to predict what they might learn from a given text and connect what they've read to what they've already learned.
Teachers and parents can help by guiding students as they review vocabulary related to a given text, encouraging them to have a dictionary or encyclopedia close by to look up unfamiliar terms, and helping them engage with the text, take good notes and summarize the main points of the reading.
September 2006
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