Apprenticing Adolescent Readers To Academic Literacy

Greenleaf, C., Schoenbach, R., Cziko, C., & Mueller, F. (2001). Apprenticing Adolescent Readers To Academic Literacy. Harvard Educational Review , 71 (1).
Summary/Analysis:In this article, the teacher researchers focus on the need to address the literacy learning needs of adolescents, and to that end, they discuss how they developed an alternative to remedial reading instruction. Their findings support the idea that basic, skills-focused programs for remediation in reading do not address the real academic issues facing teens but rather push students further away from the enjoyment of reading. In contrast, the program that they designed recognizes that most adolescents can execute the basic skills of reading, but they are inexperienced readers who need explicit teaching, modeling, and demystification of the strategies and practices of effective academic readers. The three main goals for their program were to increase engagement, fluency, and competency in reading. They followed 30 students, with a narrower focus on 8 particular students. In each case, students showed significant increases in fluency and range as readers, as well as their in their abilities to problem-solve and use good reading strategies.
I was intrigued by the direct and systematic approach that these teachers took to address an issue that faces all teachers of reading, as well as teachers of all content areas who also depend on a student’s ability to comprehend and interact with text. Their approach seems simple and straightforward, and yet it seems that approaches like theirs get overlooked for much more scripted interventions. Each 9th grade students was required to take this course, and each student came away with a better grasp of how to tackle difficult texts and, more importantly, how to be active participants in their own education. I will definitely take in to consideration many of the strategies and recommendations these thoughtful teachers have set forth in this article. As a reading teacher, I will reflect on the ways in which I explicitly teach and model the strategies that my students need to be successful academic readers.
Relevant Quotes/Concepts:
- “…for the vast majority of adolescents who can decode but not comprehend a variety of texts, a return to basic-skills instruction will only further distance them from that goal.”

- “…the assumption teachers often make is that early literacy instruction failed, that these students have weak decoding and word-level skills, and that specialized help is needed from someone who “knows how to teach reading” in a way that helps build basic skills.”
- “Yet reading researchers have long recognized the need to teach comprehension and reading to learn across the curriculum and its pervasive neglect in secondary classrooms.”

- “The majority of these inexperienced adolescent readers do not need further instruction in phonics or decoding skills. What many of them do need, however, is the opportunity and instructional support to read many and varied kinds of materials in order to build their experience, fluency, and range as readers. … what virtually all middle and high school students need- those who struggle academically as well as those who have been more successful- is the help acquiring and extending the complex comprehension processes that underlie skilled reading in the subject areas.”

- “… learning to read at early grade levels will not automatically translate into higher level academic literacy. Instead, literacy researchers have argued that for all students to learn to perform high-level, academically linked literacy tasks, teachers will need to make explicit the tacit reasoning processes, strategies, and discourse rules that shape successful readers’ and writers’ work.”

- “In an apprenticeship, an expert practitioner or mentor draws on his or her expertise to model, direct, and shape the apprentice’s growing repertoire of practice. Apprenticeship also generally involves learning while doing.”