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Apprenticing Adolescent Readers to Academic Literacy

 
There is a growing concern among educators about the problems faced by middle and high school students who struggle to read the texts assigned in their courses. Increasingly, some educators are advocating remedial reading courses focused on basic skills for struggling adolescent readers, who are often ethnically, linguistically, culturally, and/or socioeconomically outside the mainstream and often underprepared for the academic tasks they face in high school.

Cynthia Greenleaf, Ruth Schoenbach, Christine Cziko, and Faye Mueller argue that remedial reading courses are not the answer and describe as an alternative an instructional framework called Reading Apprenticeship that is based on a socially and cognitively complex conception of literacy. They argue that struggling adolescent readers are not beginning readers in need of remedial instruction in phonics or decoding skills. Rather, they are inexperienced readers who need help acquiring and extending the complex comprehension processes that underlie skilled reading in the subject areas.

In 1995, Greenleaf et al. established a program of work aimed at understanding the sources of students' reading difficulties. They began by conducting case studies of the reading histories and reading performances of thirty ninth-grade students. From analyses of these case studies, they developed a model of reading instruction based on the concept of "cognitive apprenticeship." As in a professional apprenticeship, an expert reading practitioner or mentor draws on his or her expertise to model, direct, support, and shape the apprentice's developing reading practice. The authors use this conception to develop a model of literacy apprenticeships that demystify the literacy practices and discourses of the academic disciplines that are embedded in the subject-area instruction. In their Reading Apprenticeship program, the teacher serves as a "master" reader of subject-area texts to his or her student apprentices. This instruction takes place in the process of teaching subject-area content, rather than as an instructional add-on or additional curriculum. Further, this instructional framework explicitly draws on students' strengths and abilities to provide crucial resources for the inquiry partnership.

In brief, the aim of Reading Apprenticeship is to help students become better readers of a variety of texts by:

• making the teacher's discipline-based reading processes and knowledge visible to students;
• making the students' reading processes and the social contexts, strategies, knowledge, and understandings they bring to the task of making sense of subject-matter texts visible to the teacher and to one another;
• helping students gain insight into their own reading processes; and
• helping them acquire a repertoire of problem-solving strategies with the varied texts of the academic discipline.

The authors summarize: "How we read and why we read in the ways we do become part of the curriculum, accompanying what we read in subject-matter classes."

Greenleaf et al. then describe a course that they designed and taught for all ninth-grade students at the Thurgood Marshall Academic High School in San Francisco. Called "Academic Literacy," the course included three curricular units that focused on the role and use of reading in one's personal, public, and academic worlds: Reading Self and Society, Reading Media, and Reading History. The course had three goals: to increase students' engagement, fluency, and competency in reading.

The authors collected a variety of data on the effects of their program, including both standardized test scores and qualitative data to gauge student thinking and learning. As measured by the Degree of Reading Proficiency Test, the students developed what is normally two years of reading proficiency in only seven months of instructional time while engaging in rigorous academic work. Follow-up studies showed that students continued to grow as readers at an accelerated rate into and through their tenth-grade year. Additional qualitative research also showed the positive impact of this program on students both as student-learners and as readers. The authors also completed intensive case studies of eight students, and they present data from one of these case studies in their article. This interview data enables the authors to show in vivid detail how one student improved in metacognitive, metadiscursive, and strategic reading practices during the Academic Literacy course. They write:

The interviews demonstrated that ninth-grade students can self-consciously appraise their own strengths and weaknesses as readers, set goals and work to accomplish them, and develop metacognitive monitoring and strategic control of reading processes. The interviews also affirmed that when students participate as apprentices in an inquiry into academic reading practices, they can and do appropriate the comprehension activities and dispositions toward texts available to them in the context of instruction.

In the professional development program they implemented along with the project, Greenleaf et al. also describe how subject-area teachers have been supported to embrace new and complex conceptions of reading as well as ways to develop their students' skill as academic readers, coming to locate the problem of student reading in the complexity of reading itself and beginning to see texts as sites for common inquiry in their classrooms.

Armed with new conceptions of reading, new awareness of their own expertise as discipline-based readers, and new perceptions of students as strategic and resourceful readers, subject-area teachers begin to embrace, rather than resist, the teaching of reading in their subject areas. Greenleaf et al. conclude that their program demonstrates that investing resources and putting effort into demystifying academic reading through ongoing, collaborative inquiry into reading and texts can move students through and beyond the "literacy ceiling" to increased understanding, motivation, opportunity, and agency as readers and learners.