Archive for Adolescent Literacy

Gone are the days of prim librarians glaring at rambunctious teens and pursing their lips to caution, “Shhh!”

These days, youth librarians in Cape Cod, Massachusetts—and across the country—are encouraging teens to rock on with their friends with Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Dance Dance Revolution, and other video games. When Brewster Ladies Library held a game night last month, close to 50 kids showed up.

“Gaming in libraries has been a movement for a couple of years now,” says Kathleen Mahoney, youth services librarian at the library. Before coming to Brewster in 2006, Mahoney worked at the Urban Libraries Council in Chicago. She says big city libraries have been gaming for years. Read about the trend in The Cape Cod Times online.

The Institute of Education Sciences has released the first report from MDRC’s Enhanced Reading Opportunities study, which is testing two supplemental literacy courses that aim to improve the reading comprehension skills and school performance of struggling ninth-graders. On average, the programs produced a positive, statistically significant impact on reading comprehension among students. To link to the full report, “The Enhanced Reading Opportunities Study Early Impact and Implementation Findings,” visit the publications area of MRDC Inc. MDRC, founded as the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, has been known as MDRC since 2003.

According to a longitudinal study conducted by a team of Arizona State University students, the dropout process can begin as early as kindergarten, and one of the early signs is missing many days of school. The study, which will appear in the Journal of Education Research, was reported on by Kelly Grysho in The Arizona Republic. For further information, read Grysho's article.

Why is it that so many elementary students are avid readers and so few adolescents? In an article in the January 27 issue of The Oregonian, Betsy Hammond attempts to answer that question, using recent studies as well as interviews with students and educators. For further information, read the full article.

Latinitas magazine, the first digital magazine made for and by Latina youth, is launching a print magazine for "tweens" and older in 2008. As part of that launch, the magazine is sponsoring the Latinitas Magazine National Writing Contest seeking feedback from Latina youth ages 14 to 21 on "What it is to be Latina." Winning writers will see their articles published in the print and online issues of Latinitas magazine.

Submissions should be 800 to 1,000 words in first person or Associated Press style on one of the following subjects: What is it like to be a Hispanic/Latina female in your hometown? What does it mean to you to be a Hispanic/Latina female? As a Hispanic/Latina female, are you doing something in your community to make a difference; if so, what? Describe the biggest challenge facing young Hispanic/Latinas today. Applicants should submit articles to latinitasawards@yahoo.com by February 10, 2008, or mail a copy to Latinitas, PO Box 4284, Austin, TX 78765.

Latinitas magazine is a nonprofit publication. For further information, visit the magazine's website.

AdLit.org, a new website that targets educators and parents of adolescent readers, was recently launched by WETA Learning Media. Building on the success of sister sites ReadingRockets.org, ColorinColorado.org, and LDOnLine.org, the new service focuses on helping students from fourth through 12th grades to read and write better.

AdLit.org offers research-based articles, instructional material for classroom teachers, tips for parents, book recommendations, exclusive interviews with top authors, and a free, monthly e-newsletter called Word Up! The project is funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York and by the Ann B. and Thomas L. Friedman Family Foundation. For further information, visit AdLit.org.

On November 2, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced the national distribution of 520,000 free, new books as part of the 2007 Adolescent Readers Initiative. The initiative, a joint venture between the Department of Education and the nonprofit entity First Book, is designed to improve the literacy skills of struggling young adults in low-income schools and communities. For additional information see the Department’s press release.

The nonprofit ACT, best known for its college admissions exam, seeks four outstanding teachers from middle school, junior high, or high school in the areas of science, mathematics, social studies, and language arts to participate in its Visiting Teacher Program for 2008. The program brings teachers from across the United States to ACT's national headquarters in Iowa City, Iowa, where they can use their classroom expertise to review, evaluate, and develop English, math, science, and social studies teacher resources and instructional support materials.

The six-week program runs June 16-July 25. Selected teachers will receive a stipend of $5,500 and the cost of round-trip transportation. ACT will secure and partially subsidize housing for the visiting teachers. The deadline for application is December 28, 2007. For details, visit the ACT website.

The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of the American Library Association, invites schools and libraries to join the celebration of Teen Read Week October 14-20. This year's celebration revolves around the theme "LOL @ your library." For further information and resources such as recommended booklists and a "Teens' Top Ten" list, visit the Teen Read Week webpage.

Danielle Chappell had no reason to doubt she was a solid student. She earned decent grades, even scoring some A’s in English and math, while balancing schoolwork with basketball, track and a spot on the dance team. Then she graduated from Cardozo High School in Washington, D.C. and arrived at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, where she bombed the placement tests so badly that she had to take remedial English and math. Low grades overall put her on academic probation. Finally, mid–sophomore year, she was forced to withdraw. To examine the fate of one graduating class of D.C. high school students is to find multiple stories like Chappell’s—stories that illustrate how a struggling urban school system often fails to shepherd its students and set them on a promising path to adulthood. Read the article at washingtonpost.com.

Schools should set aside at least 30 minutes a day for silent reading, and all 11-year-olds’ reading ability should be tested when they start secondary school, a leading education figure will say today. In a speech at the National Conference on Accelerated Learning, the chairman of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, Sir Cyril Taylor, will say there is still a “serious problem” with literacy levels in schools in spite of “much good work.” Read more of this article at Guardian Unlimited.

Beyond its cluster of office towers, Tulsa is a city built close to the ground, a broad clash of neighborhoods you can tell apart by how the grass grows, bright and trim as a putting green in the richer sections, pale and shaggy in the poorer spots. Tulsa native S.E. Hinton, a cult figure for 40 years since the publication of The Outsiders, knows the difference between the wild and the well-kept lawn. Her million-selling book not only helped establish the young adult novel but remains a classic story of gangs at knife’s edge. Once a teen sensation who wrote her most famous book while still in high school, Hinton is now 59, a dry-witted, sad-eyed woman wearing jeans and sneakers for a recent interview. As a child, she dreamed of writing a book she wanted to read, a novel that told the truth about how kids think. Forty years later, a lot of young people still think she succeeded. Read more of this article from The Associated Press.

  Following the release of the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading and math results yesterday, which showed that reading test scores improved two points for fourth grade students, and only one point for eighth grade students, IRA President Linda Gambrell pointed out the need to continue to stress adolescent reading instruction.

“The inability of eighth grade students to demonstrate continuing growth is significant because it reflects a second type of achievement gap—one that narrows students’ options just as they are beginning to make adult life choices about careers and further education.” Gambrell suggested that the mainly primary school model of reading instruction may be dated. “As students age, they confront more complex material in and out of school that requires an increasing level of reading accomplishment. Why not provide middle and high school students with an instructional focus that allows them to master content in science, social studies, and other areas while improving their critical reading skills? As for students who are still grade levels behind in reading, provide special assistance so they can close their skills gap. The older they are, the more urgent the challenge.” Read more of Gambrell’s comments.

The Newspaper Association of America Foundation has started a major initiative to engage young newspaper readers. The Foundation has launched a YouTube contest designed to encourage teens to tell how they use newspapers in their lives—for anything from acing their current events test to making weekend plans. Entries will be accepted until Dec. 17. The Foundation will feature links to the most creative videos on its website, and the person who submits the best entry will receive a brand new iPhone and a trip for two to attend NAA’s Annual Convention in Washington, D.C. Read more about the contest on the Foundation’s website.

Judy Blume is back. One of the most popular children’s book writers of all time, Blume was a powerhouse of the 1970s and ’80s. She secured her place in the pantheon of greats with such books as Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Superfudge and Forever, a young-adult novel that broke new ground in sexual frankness (and secured Blume’s place as a perennial target of censors). Resting on one’s laurels might seem a good plan at this point. Instead, five months before her 70th birthday, Blume has a new chapter-book series starring her old pals, the Pain and the Great One, and she has embarked on her first national tour in 10 years. Read more about Blume’s career, and her new book, in this article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

A visitor well versed in Southern stereotypes might be disappointed to discover that the indigenous people of Spartanburg, South Carolina, harbor a passion not for a benighted Confederacy, but for literature. In fact, few places in the nation are doing more to advance literacy than this historic textile-mill town, where books are free and reading is rewarded. Read more about the free book program in this article from The Orlando Sentinel, by columnist Kathleen Parker.

It is 10:30 a.m. on a sunny Thursday morning in Hargeisa, in the self–declared republic of Somaliland’s capital and 15–year–old Mohamed Yusuf is skipping school. He and a half–dozen of his classmates have trekked 5 km through the dusty streets of Hargeisa to attend a session of Biyo Dhacay primary school’s Child–to–Child club. In other words, Mohamed and his friends are skipping school to attend school. Funded by the UN Children’s Fund and implemented by the Somaliland Students Assembly, Somalia’s child-directed learning programs have a simple guiding principle—students identify a problem, then plan and carry out projects to address the problem. Read more at IRIN News.

For years, the question “Why can't Johnny read?” has plagued teachers, students and parents. Another troubling question, especially as students move into their teen years, is: “Why won’t he or she read?” The questions point to two critical problems affecting millions of teenagers: students who can’t read at grade level and those who don’t want to read, known as “reluctant readers.” Read more of this article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

University of California Santa Barbara cultural studies professor Constance Penley says that when it comes to literacy among youth, there’s entirely too much hand-wringing going on. “They’re reading; they’re writing,” she said, “just not in the ways we think of it.” According to Penley, we need to see video images and text messages as an evolution rather than a devolution of literacy. Read more of this article from the Ventura County Star.

To connect young people with the excitement of a real page-turner, the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) celebrates Teen Read Week from October 14–20, 2007. Celebrated in hundreds of libraries, Teen Read Week uses interactive gaming, poetry slams, book clubs, and library social networking events to encourage teens to read. For more information about Teen Read Week, visit the American Library Association’s Teen Read Week website. In addition, this page contains many ideas on how you can help publicize the event.

Precious summer minutes spent poring over Shakespeare or Nathaniel Hawthorne may seem less than appealing to teens, but some experts say there is a slowly growing trend to infuse more modern literature into required summer reading. As a result, the revered literary canon, which includes such classics as Hamlet, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Scarlet Letter, may be due for a shake-up. Glance at high school summer reading lists across the United States and you are likely to find more recent authors such as Alice Sebold, Walter Dean Myers, and even Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong, alongside Dickens and the Brontë sisters. Read the article in The Christian Science Monitor that quotes Alleen Pace Nilsen, the International Reading Association’s 2005 winner of the Arbuthnot Award, which honors an outstanding college or university teacher of children’s and young adults’ literature.

British teenagers should be forced to stay after school to take part in activities such as sports and drama clubs, the Institute for Public Policy Research said July 26. The leftwing thinktank wants to see a legal extension to the school day so that every child is required to do at least an hour a week of after-school activities, rather than simply being offered the chance to do them. This would prevent the disaffected teenagers most in need of constructive after-school activities from missing out, said the IPPR study. According to its research, regular participation in at least one extracurricular activity each week can radically improve life chances of young people. Read the story at Guardian Unlimited.

As the seventh and final installment in J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter series hits bookstore shelves, Daniel Nexon of The New Republic writes that the series “functions something like a Rorschach Blot: In countries around the world, it captures various national anxieties about contemporary culture and international affairs.” Read more of Nexon’s column, available for free from the CBS News website.

Did Harry Potter really change the world? It seems an absurd question to ask about a series of children’s books. But when that series sells 325 million copies worldwide, with tens of millions to be added this weekend when the final installment of J.K. Rowling’s wizardly fantasy goes on sale, it gets a little less so. Plenty of claims have been made. Among them: Harry got kids to read, especially boys, and he revitalized the sleepy universe of children’s publishing. Talk to informed observers of that universe, however, and you'll find that nearly every claim made for Harry is open to interpretation, if not dispute. Read more of this article from The Washington Post.

Pathways to Education, a stay-in-school initiative, has been stepping in to fill the cracks in Regent Park in Toronto, Ontario, since 2001, with startling success—the high-school dropout rate went from one in two down to one in 10. Now Pathways’ founders are rolling out their program to five other Ontario communities, with ambitions to see it take root across the country. Since Pathways began, the high-school dropout rate in Regent Park has plunged from 56% to just 10%, well below the averages for Toronto (26%) and Ontario (29%). Meanwhile, postsecondary enrolment has quadrupled, from 20% to 80%. Read about it here.

Reading and writing instruction must be included in all academic areas if literacy is to improve to levels that will ensure the nation’s middle and high school students are prepared for success in college, work, and citizenship, according to a new report from the Alliance for Excellent Education. Literacy Instruction in the Content Areas: Getting to the Core of Middle and High School Improvement argues that the acceptable standard for all students must exceed simply reading at grade level. Only advanced reading skills will truly prepare students to meet the challenges of education beyond high school, the needs of the workplace, and the demands of the 21st century.

Forget piddling around a mere few days for an iPhone. Two sisters are in the midst of an 11-day vigil for this summer’s hottest, “must have” low-tech phenomenon—the latest Harry Potter novel. Read more about their wait in this article from Forbes.

Of all the magical powers wielded by Harry Potter, perhaps none has cast a stronger spell than his supposed ability to transform the reading habits of young people. In what has become near mythology about the wildly popular series by J. K. Rowling, many parents, teachers, librarians and booksellers have credited it with inspiring a generation of kids to read for pleasure in a world dominated by instant messaging and music downloads. But in keeping with the intricately plotted novels themselves, the truth about Harry Potter and reading is not quite so straightforward a success story. Read more of this article from The New York Times.

So here we are: at the end of the “Harry Potter” decade. The books have been printed and are under lock and key. (Presumably.) J. K. Rowling has made her choices. Harry is either going to live or die. Severus Snape is either evil or good—or maybe a little bit of both. Ginny will stick with Harry, and Ron will hook up with Hermione. Or not. Eager readers still have to wait a fortnight or so for answers to these questions. Which is why the Op-Ed page of The New York Times asked four writers and one artist to fill the void and draft “Harry Potter” endings of their own. Read more of this article to see how Meg Cabot, Larry Doyle, Polly Horvath, and Damon Lindelof would end the series.

Starting this fall, the Mount Vernon city school district will roll out a literacy program created by boxing legend Muhammad Ali that is aimed at motivating struggling readers. The program, Go the Distance, installs classroom library collections of fiction and nonfiction books that share the common themes of confidence building, determination, respect and other values. Read more of this article from The Journal News of New York.

Wanted: Bodyguard for a 17-year-old boy who is mythical on paper but exists for real in the hearts of millions of readers. Rumors, theories and spoilers are beginning to fly predicting who lives and who dies in the seventh and final Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. One spoiler, filled with misspellings, circulating on the Web last week was from “Gabriel,” who claimed to have hacked into computers at U.K. publisher Bloomsbury to find out the ending. Read more about the tight security surrounding the publication of the final Harry Potter book in this article from USA Today.

Mark Jacobsen is the president and co-founder of Adventure Boys, a company committed to saving boyhood by encouraging fathers and sons to participate in heroic adventures and real life experiences together. The Adventure Boys experience begins with a series of original, pulp-style character-driven paperback books that allow fathers and sons to relate on everything from racecars and fighter planes to Wild West gunfights and science experiments. In this interview from the website ednews.org, Jacobsen talks about the Adventure Boys paperbacks and his website, adventureboys.com, which features activities to enhance writing skills.

For years, reading the Harry Potter books to his daughter, Julia, proved to be an educational experience for Eric D. Randall. The more he read, the more questions Julia had about what certain words meant. Then one day, Julia suggested someone create a dictionary to define words such as marauder and comeuppance. Two years later, that someone was her dad. Read more about the man who wrote the book, The Pottersaurus: 1,500 Words that Harry Potter Readers Need to Know, in this article from The Beaumont Enterprise of Texas.

In a recent New York Times essay, writer Joe Queenan looks at the summer reading lists assigned to teenagers and remembers his own battle, 40 years ago, with Hardy’s The Return of the Native. He discovers that while many teenagers realize summer reading can be a valuable experience, he can’t get past page six of the book that tormented him so many years ago.

The adventures of boy wizard Harry Potter can stay in Gwinnett County school libraries, despite a mother’s objections, a judge ruled Tuesday. Laura Mallory, who argued the popular fiction series is an attempt to indoctrinate children in witchcraft, said she still wants the best-selling books removed and may take her case to federal court. Read more about the decision in this article from The Washington Post.

A list of the top 160 books for teenage boys has been published by England’s Education Secretary in an ambitious attempt to encourage boys to read more for pleasure and keep up with girls at secondary school. The list has gained as much attention over the authors who have been left off (no Dickens, no J.K. Rowling) as over those who are included. Read more about the list, and see all of the titles, in this article from The Times of London.

J.K. Rowling has a request for those with inside dirt on her seventh and final Harry Potter book: Please keep it to yourself. Read more about Rowling’s efforts to keep the book’s contents under wraps in this Associated Press article, posted on the CNN website.

 Legislation was introduced before the U.S. House of Representatives today that would authorize a new 5-year grant program to help states and local education agencies establish literacy programs for students in grades 4–12. States and schools would use these funds to create school literacy teams, provide adolescent literacy training for teachers and school leaders, improve reading curriculum, and involve parents in adolescent literacy instruction. Introduced by Kentucky Congressman John Yarmuth, the legislation is modeled after a Striving Readers pilot program that was conducted in eight school districts nationwide, including one in Yarmuth’s district.

For commentary, see joint statement of four leading education associations applauding and urging passage of this bill.

As a child growing up in midtown Manhattan, Henry Winkler—Fonzie from television’s “Happy Days”—was anything but cool. He was called lazy, unmotivated and stupid by his teachers, his peers, and even his parents. It was not until 1976, when he was 31 years old, that he was diagnosed with dyslexia. Winkler perservered and, along with children’s media producer Lin Oliver, has cowritten a book series inspired by his true-life experiences growing up with dyslexia. Read more about Winkler’s experiences—and the eleventh book in his series— in this article from The Morning Call of Allentown, PA.

Maryland’s top education official is recommending that Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse start sharing the limelight with classic fiction in classrooms throughout the state. Teachers have long seen comic books peeking out from a backpack or the corner of a desk or tucked between the pages of a textbook. Bringing them into the light, Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick hopes, will grab the imagination of boys and give teachers another way of enticing reluctant readers into good literature. Read more about this approach to reading in this article from The Baltimore Sun.

Finding a book that can engage a reluctant reader is not easy, says Jennifer Groff, the library media specialist at Belle Sherman Elementary School in Ithaca, N.Y. Children can feel defeated if by age 9 or 10 they haven’t found a book they can connect with. Ms. Groff, who reads Harry Potter aloud to fourth- and fifth-graders at lunch three days a week, says there is something about the way the story is told that captivates kids. Teachers assess the impact the popular series has had on children’s learning in this article from The Christian Science Monitor.

The youth of Ireland are becoming increasingly poor spellers and writers, and their love of text messaging on cellphones is a major reason why, according to the Education Department. In a report published Wednesday on national test results in English for about 37,000 students aged 15 and 16, the department’s Examination Commission said cutting-edge communications technology has encouraged poor literacy and a blunt, choppy style at odds with academic rigor. Read more about the report in this article from USA Today.

The problem teachers often see is that many students have difficulty reading and therefore do not enjoy it. The theory developed by Parsons High School in Kansas to combat the problem was, if students could learn that reading is an enjoyable experience, they would read more and increase their vocabulary and comprehension. The result? A reading course that provides an elective credit to students who read a minimum of three books every nine weeks, write a two-page college level book report on each book, and go through a one-on-one evaluation with the teacher to discuss the report and comprehension of the book. Read more about this program in this article from the Parsons Sun of Parsons, Kansas.

Washington Governor Chris Gregoire is in a standoff with the chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee over the possibility of delaying the reading and writing sections of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning as a high school graduation requirement. Sen. Rosemary McAuliffe said that 41 school superintendents, primarily in districts with high numbers of low-income children and those who speak English as a second language, have asked her for the reading and writing delay. Read more of this article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Cassie Brannon couldn’t stand reading last year. But now Brannon, a 10th-grader at Parkland High School in North Carolina, is learning to love it because of a new approach that school staff members and system officials developed to incorporate reading into everything Parkland’s teachers do. Read more about Parkland’s Balanced Literacy program in this article from the Winston-Salem Journal.

A new pre-doctoral fellowship program is being established by the National Academy of Education to support doctoral research focused on adolescent literacy. The goal of this program, launched with support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, is to strengthen and stimulate adolescent literacy education by infusing the field with highly talented, well-trained, and motivated researchers and teacher educators. The Adolescent Literacy Pre-Doctoral Fellowship Program will encourage more scholars in schools of education and related disciplines to conduct dissertation research focused on improving literacy outcomes for middle and secondary students. Fellows will each receive a stipend of $25,000, to be disbursed over a period of up to two years, to support them in finalizing their dissertation proposals, designing and conducting rigorous research, analyzing their data, and writing up their dissertation research results. Twenty fellows will be accepted for the two-year fellowships. Fellowship applications and further information will be available after June 1, 2007 on the Academy’s website, www.naeducation.org, and applications will be accepted through December 1, 2007. Information is also available by calling (202) 334-2341.

Teachers at Evanston High School in suburban Chicago, like educators elsewhere, have been supplementing the traditional classic texts like The Odyssey, The Scarlet Letter and other standards with recently published books to provide a more varied, and palatable, literary menu for students. Such decisions, some experts say, can add the kind of engaging and relevant content that high school reform advocates have been calling for. Nevertheless, the use of popular literature has run up against traditionalists, who fear it will dumb down the curriculum, and parents who object to the controversial themes that characterize many of the selections. Read more about this debate in this article from Education Week.

Teens’ literacy rates are dropping to the point that some consider it a crisis. The statistics are disconcerting, say representatives from the Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group acting on behalf of at-risk, low-performing secondary school students. Read about those disconcerting statistics in this article from the The Repository of Canton, Ohio.

School officials in Montgomery County, Maryland, announced a pilot program tailored to the specific needs of recent immigrants who have had little formal education although they are reaching the age when most native-born Americans graduate from high school. Students would be taught functional English, with an emphasis on career-specific vocabulary. Other classes would explore careers, including horticulture, cosmetology and hospitality. Students also would be taught to read and write fluently in their native Spanish. Read more of this article from The Washington Post.

On March 22, 2007 Senators Jeff Sessions and Patty Murray introduced the Striving Readers Act of 2007 (S. 958) in the United States Senate. This bill will vastly expand the capacity of schools to help older students who struggle with reading by establishing adolescent literacy initiatives aimed at increasing high school graduation and college readiness.

The legislation will expand the current Striving Readers Program, which funds only eight grants. The Striving Readers Act of 2007 will make funding available to every state to implement schoolwide adolescent literacy programs, support statewide initiates, and allow data collection and rigorous evaluation to document program success. In addition, this bill will prepare teachers to incorporate literacy strategies in core academic classes and will assist parents by training them to support their children’s literacy development.

The International Reading Association endorses expanded services for adolescent readers and urges members to contact their Senators to sign on to this legislation. See sample letter at http://latadvisory.blogspot.com.

See the press release announcing IRA’s endorsement.

Who says teens in the United States don't read these days? According to an article by Cecelia Goodnow of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, it's a time of strong writing and strong sales in the area of adolescent literature. In fact, Goodnow quotes young adult literature authority Michael Cart as saying we are "smack-dab in the new golden age of young adult literature." For further information, read the full article.

It’s a time of strong writing and strong sales in young adult literature as readers in the 12-to-18 age group rock the marketplace. Credit a bulging teen population, a surge of global talent and perhaps a bit of Harry Potter afterglow as the preteen Muggles of yesteryear carry an ingrained reading habit into later adolescence. Whatever the reasons, many agree that we’re in the midst of a new golden age of young adult literature. Read more about how teens are actively shaping the literary scene in this article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

America’s secondary schools educate roughly two million English language learners (ELLs), students whose literacy skills are not yet strong enough to permit them to succeed in an English-language classroom setting without extra support. As a group, they are among the country’s lowest-performing students, scoring far below the national average on the reading portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The Alliance for Excellent Education’s new issue brief, Urgent but Overlooked: The Literacy Crisis Among Adolescent English Language Learners, reviews the existing research on literacy instruction for adolescent ELLs and offers challenges for policymakers to consider.

In an effort to reach struggling or reluctant readers, educators and publishers are creating and distributing books that students not only want to read but that also will not embarrass them in front of their classmates. Read more about the provocative books that are hooking struggling readers in this article from the Times Argus of Barre, Vermont.

Across the nation, secondary schools are treading into territory once considered the domain of primary schools. They are teaching adolescents to read. Read about how teachers in Colorado are tackling this issue in this article from The Denver Post.

For an hour each morning, the eighth-grade students in the Language Immersion program at the Education Laboratory — a charter school in Hawaii — follow along in their books to the sound of their teacher’s voice, rising suddenly to sharp bursts of Harry Potter dialogue and then back to a weaseling voice for sly Professor Snape as he reads out loud from the popular series. At the same time, they are subconsciously recognizing verbs and nouns and predicates and clauses — absorbing language and literature in a way designed to make them accomplished readers and fluid, fluent writers. Read more about this approach to instruction in this article from The Honolulu Advertiser.

The ickier the better. The bloodier, funnier, scarier and more action-packed, the better. That’s a motto that Judi Kubicki, a teacher at Boulan Park Middle School in Troy, Michigan, is sticking by when it comes to engaging her sixth-grade boys in reading. Read more about this “Boogers and Farts” approach to reading in this article from the Detroit Free Press.

National school tests for 11 and 14-year-olds in England eventually could be scrapped altogether. Ministers want pupils to take shorter but more frequent tests when teachers feel individual pupils are ready. The idea will be piloted for two years in 10 areas of England starting in September. It is one of the measures to be unveiled by Education Secretary Alan Johnson, who will also propose one-to-one tuition at home for classroom under-achievers. The focus of his announcement is a new drive for literacy and numeracy. Statistics to be released Thursday are expected to show that dozens of previously highly regarded schools have been failing to teach many of their pupils basic literacy and numeracy. Read the article at the ITV website.

Grammar lessons all but vanished from public schools in the 1970s, supplanted by a more holistic view of English instruction. But several factors — most notably, the addition of a writing section to the SAT college entrance exam in 2005 — have reawakened interest in direct grammar instruction. This article appears in The Washington Post.

It's not as well known as the Newbery or Caldecott, but the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature is from the same people, and the books it honors are ones with strong appeal for an audience that can be harder to motivate.

 The International Reading Association invites applications from qualified members for the editorship of its Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. This volunteer position has a term of six years. Application deadline is October 1, 2006. Find complete information at the IRA website.

The Just Read program matches volunteer tutors with adolescents whose limited literacy skills in English are putting them at risk for failure in school and in life.

A trends article in the Washington Post provides an overview of the many associations and experts, including IRA President Timothy Shanahan, who feel concerned about adolescent literacy levels and urge a greater effort to raise them.

Arizona high schools are ratcheting up reading instruction in an effort to have kids meet standards and pass the tests needed to graduate.

A study of children’s competence in English and maths in primary and early secondary school reveals that more than half of all 14-year-olds have not reached expected standards in basic numeracy and literacy. Get specifics at the BBC News website.

Four local teen bands are part of a concert organized by a librarian to promote the library's youth-friendly offerings.

An estimated 30 public high schools in Toronto now stop for 20 minutes a day to read for pleasure. Teachers and principals know the practice is popular; they’re about to find out whether it translates into improved literacy test scores. Find details in The Toronto Star.

A study says the ways a program called the Alabama Reading Initiative helped secondary students who struggle with reading could serve as a model for the rest of the United States. A local newspaper article reacts.

Florida is ratcheting up efforts to boost teens' reading abilities, with improved comprehension a major goal.

A comprehensive effort to promote reading skills in a Kentucky high school is achieving remarkable results, and the whole district has adopted the approach after seeing it raise skills and motivation.

Some 20% of Florida middle- and high-school students with difficulties in reading were not put in reading classes even though the state requires it, and state officials are urging superintendents to enroll them—and providing extra money to make it happen.

The Florida Comprehensive Assessment tests show many of the state's adolescents reading below required levels, and some say it's because more reading support for older students is required.

The Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum in Hannibal, MO, will be offering a teachers’ workshop from June 19–23, 2006, for elementary and secondary school teachers to help them bring Twain’s writings into the classroom. For more information contact Henry Sweets at henry.sweets@marktwainmuseum.org. Telephone 573–221–9010.

Teachers in Victoria, Australia, are heaping scorn on Prime Minister John Howard for suggesting that their approach to teaching literature amounts to “rubbish” and “gobbledegook.” Find details in The Age.

They haven't entirely jettisoned the classic required works, but educators are finding that ever-more ethnically diverse students respond to contemporary novels by, and about, people like themselves.

Minnesota's high school sophomores posted the highest passing rate on the state's basic skills writing test, according to results released Tuesday by state education officials.

Concerned about a fall-off in reading scores after the elementary grades, some Florida districts are making an across-the-board effort to improve older students' literacy skills in what one coach calls a "reading movement."

A newspaper series examines issues and efforts in several Oregon school districts increasing their emphasis on reading skills for older students.

Anecdotally it seems that in Danbury Connecticut, in the United States, and maybe even internationally, teens read more than they used to.

North Carolina governor Mike Easley has told legislators at an education conference that his budget plan for next year will include literacy coaches to help middle-grade teachers strengthen the reading and writing skills of their students. This story appears in The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC).

A Year 12 English exam that failed to penalise students for poor spelling or grammar and asked them to compare two film posters but not read a book was evidence of falling educational standards in Western Australia, the federal government has declared. Get details in The Australian.

In observance of US National Poetry Month in April, the Academy of American Poets will launch the first-ever Poetry Read-a-Thon. Geared for middle school students (grades 5–8), the Read-a-Thon’s goals are to celebrate the reading of poems and writing about poems. Find details at the Academy’s poets.org website.

A group of Californian educators have developed a new 12th-grade expository reading and writing course designed to teach students the critical reading skills needed to succeed at the college level.

An editorial from the Las Vegas Review-Journal notes a problem with the state's high school graduates—more than 40 percent needed remedial courses when they entered public colleges. The editorial offers advice for both educators and parents.

A community college English instructor notes that few high school graduates read for pleasure, and offers her opinion about what has caused their lack of interest.

A commentator says that perennially maligned teenagers, and particularly urban youth, present a more nuanced, encouraging, and stereotype-breaking portrait of themselves through an organization called Youth Communication.

A reading program that had caused debate in the Baltimore, Maryland school system over what some saw as a inappropriate reading material and a lack of rigor will be retained, although some changes and review are planned.

The support isn't yet as great as it is for younger children, but more educators are starting to stress the need for—and see good results springing from—an effort to make sure that high-schoolers are reading and comprehending well.

The cornerstone of an academic reform package for San Diego's Oceanside High School will be to identify teens who read at an elementary school level and give them a daily two-hour dose of language-arts instruction.

Lack of “a sufficiently varied or demanding reading diet” in earlier grades is leaving too many students unable to cope with the longer, more complex works required in the upper grades. So finds a government report that criticizes a curriculum that relies too heavily on excerpts and short stories at the expense of novels and book-length works of nonfiction. Read about the study at BBC News (UK).

Slate contributor Ann Hulbert argues that the "trendy and tidy didacticism" of problem novels typical of young-adult fiction can "end up as assigned reading for older kids precisely when these students deserve to be discovering the difference between real literature and the melodramatic fictional equivalent of an After School Special."

Nouns are "stuff." Verbs are "what stuff does." And after Baltimore adopts an unproven teen-oriented reading curriculum called Studio Course for its middle schools, controversy arises over the decision.

In Australia, the elements of poetry found in rap and other youth-culture forms of expression have made their way into the classroom and proven their worth in motivating students.

They can help motivate teens, bring families together for story time, enrich ESL learners—audio books are said to have multiple benefits. And there's a sidebar on picking them.

The popular stylized comic-strips from Japan known as "manga" will start to appear next year in a number of North American newspapers, in hopes that they will draw young readers into a rapidly graying readership.

The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD)'s October 2005 issue of Educational Leadership magazine focuses on reading comprehension in middle and high school.

In a national trend visible in the Portland area and Oregon generally, educators have moved to raise teens' reading skills with literacy coaches and other means.

The National Association of Secondary School principals (NASSP) has produced a guide for school administrators designed to help them use research on best literacy practices to create a well-defined intervention plan that will improve the literacy of all students, and particularly those who struggle with reading. The guide is available as a free PDF download from NASSP’s www.principals.org website.

Library circulation at least doubled. An average increase of 30% in numbers of teachers visiting the library media centers was reported. These are just two of the positive findings from Adolescents Read!, a new publication from the New York Life Revitalizing High School Libraries Initiative, administered by the Public Education Network.

The publication describes the results of a pilot project in three cities to create library media centers that are true centers of teaching and learning and foster a school culture that values and promotes high levels of adolescent literacy. To learn more, see the full publication.

A newspaper columnist recommends that rebellious teens should twit their elders and read banned books, especially since it's Banned Books Week.

Failing to make adequate yearly progress, a junior high school tries devoting one academic period a day to a literacy promotion project.

Education Minister Gerard Kennedy has enlisted the enthusiastic help of Ontario’s elementary teachers in stemming the province’s alarming high school dropout rate. Addressing the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario annual meeting in Toronto, Kennedy said, “If Ontario is going to see more students finish high school, those at risk of dropping out need to be identified and helped while they’re still in the elementary grades.” Find out more in this article from the Toronto Star.

Professional writers are helping teenaged women to find their writing voices through an organization called Girls Write Now, according to this Christian Science Monitor article.

Research with secondary students has found real deficiencies in word-level reading, even for many students not considered slow or learning disabled. Though most of these students can recognise common words in print, they are not sufficiently competent with irregularly spelled or unfamiliar words. Their reading is often slow and their understanding is impeded by this lack of fluency. Read more on this topic in The Age (Australia).

A computer program that marks student essays for content and style will be used at universities across the UK within a few years, it was claimed last night. According to James Christie, a computing lecturer at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, computers can now grade first-year undergraduate essays in subjects including history and geography. Get details in this article from The Guardian (UK).

The different means that innovative schools use to match literacy instruction to young men's needs and interests is the subject of this Christian Science Monitor article.

The most efficient way to ensure that adolescents achieve a high level of literacy skill is to focus on intervention in the earliest grades, argues an American School Board Journal article.

New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, is often cited as the epitome of public school excellence. Nearly 95 percent of its graduates go on to four-year colleges. Its courses cover marine biology and music theory, international relations and advanced Japanese. These days, however, New Trier and other large, high-performing high schools are rethinking whether the stress being placed upon students is unhealthy.

Read the full article from the Christian Science Monitor.

Dysfunctional families, disturbed teenagers, suicide, pain, and loneliness — for the past two decades, adolescent literature has presented a bleak, often despairing, view of the world. But a new trend is emerging. Over the past few years, an increasing number of “novels of hope” have been published alongside, and even overtaking, the “hard-core realism” stories.

Read the article in The Age (Australia).

As President Bush and education policymakers turn their attention to fixing America’s underachieving high schools, more districts nationwide will need to address one fundamental — but largely unheralded — cause of student failure: A huge number of teens simply can’t make much sense of their textbooks.

How does quality of instruction affect reading ability in high school English classes? How do students in different course tracks and from different socioeconomic backgrounds respond to high-quality instuction? Researchers William Carbonaro and Adam Gamoran report that although the quality of instruction tends to be inconsistent across tracks, “access to high-quality instruction and content may be particularly important in mitigating the effect of socioeconomic status on reading achievement.” A summary of their report is presented in the current edition of ASCD’s