Strategies to Support Struggling Adolescent Readers, Grades 6-12

by Katherine S. McKnight

When students are in elementary school, a teacher who has expertise in teaching the fundamentals of reading instructs them. At the middle and high school level that stops – and the timing could not be worse. The literacy demands increase exponentially, yet typically schools do not teach adolescents how to successfully read the increasingly difficult materials they encounter throughout their day. As the rigor increases in their classes, student coping skills become less effective. Consequently, the achievement gap becomes wider and more difficult to close during the adolescent years.

When it comes time to prescribe an intervention, middle and high school teachers are hitting a wall. Decoding and comprehension materials are often presented at an elementary level. The students feel bad enough that they struggle with reading; assigned ‘baby work’ increases the stigma. This book addresses the need for 6-12 teachers to have appropriate literacy intervention materials to use with struggling adolescent readers.

This book will also help teachers learn how to support any adolescent reader—struggling or not—when they encounter challenging text. The book features two decoding and comprehension. Each strand contains lessons, materials, a difficulty dial, tips for implementation and student samples.

194 pages, Paperback

Published March 16, 2018

Reviews

[Amanda Erdman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book for my “opposing view” category for The Literary Life podcast group. I’m so glad I read it. As a former elementary and reading teacher who has left the field and has been teaching her own children the last 14 years, I was a little rusty on ideas to help my severely dyslexic 5th grade son. First, it was comforting to be reminded he is not that unusual. Even the SLP we saw for his dyslexia diagnosis assured me he is likely getting far better services at home than he would in a school. By middle school, there is so much content driven reading and most middle school teachers do not have experience teaching kids phonics and other reading strategies. I’m thankful I can still work on it with him while reading aloud awesome literature to keep up with his intelligence level (which is quite high).

That said, there is a lot of public school garbage in here. I realize as school teachers many of us are tempted to use worksheets, tests, if/then charts…so MANY CHARTS! Especially in our ESL classes! I can’t express my gratitude to Charlotte Mason and those who share her ideas with me. We do none of these things. We read, we narrate, we commonplace…all methods that are super effective, enjoyable, worth doing over your lifetime, and take less time!

However, phonics and a few of the most basic reading and decoding strategies are necessary even in middle school. I appreciated these ideas and the encouragement I received in this book.