Adolescent Literacy Interview

Julie Meltzer, PCG Education and Sid Okashige, LAB discuss Adolescent Literacy - July 24, 2001

Sid: Julie, let’s start with a definition. What is adolescent literacy?

Julie: Well Sid, I think that adolescent literacy is having teenagers have the reading, writing, speaking and listening skills they need to learn in school and out of school, whatever it is they need to know, and to have those skills to an adequate level so that they can communicate to whatever audiences they need to in a credible way and they can negotiate the world that they need to. That means that there's a cultural component to this. They need to be able to participate in whatever cultural communities they both belong to and in a larger society in the ways that society sees as powerful. So it's an empowerment and equity issue as well.

Sid: Now, early literacy has been a priority at the national level so that if these elementary programs had been successful, why would we need high schools to focus on reading and writing?

Julie: Well I think that most people connect adolescent literacy programs in the high school with correcting and remediation. There will always be some need, no matter how successful elementary programs are, for remediation and effective remediation. But it goes so far beyond that. High schools will still need to focus on reading, and writing, speaking, and listening skills because of the increased literacy demands inherent in learning high school content. The new standards are much higher in the content areas in terms of these demands and literacy skills are needed to learn that content. English Language Learners, a much larger component of our student population than ever before, are also going to require continued literacy scaffolding in order to maximize their content learning. So for all of those reasons high schools will need to continue to focus and to get much better, much more effective at supporting literacy.

Sid: Thank you. Now we have good research on adolescent literacy. We have a solid knowledge base and this urgency for adolescent literacy is clear, some have even called it a crisis, so what is holding us back?

Julie: Well, I think that in the past high schools have just not seen it as their job to teach reading and writing. I think on top of that you've got departmental structures which are content focused, which do not look at how to embed strategies to support literacy. You also have pre-service teacher issues where teacher education departments, for a variety of reasons, sometimes because states don't require it, either mandate minimal or in some cases until recently, no content area reading or high school literacy classes, for any of those teachers going into the secondary realm. So there have been a number of reasons that this has not been effectively pursued in a systemic way.

Sid: So how are high school teachers supposed to address both literacy and content areas?

Julie: I don’t think it’s an either/or proposition, Sid, I think it’s a matter of teachers getting much better at both understanding literacy demands in their content area and being able to use strategies that will help students to use reading and writing to learn content and if teachers do that, if they infuse their content focused teaching with literacy support, students will learn a lot more content. Let me give you an example. If you can’t understand a scientific argument, then you can’t understand the science that you’re trying to learn. If you can’t understand how history is presented, you can’t really understand the points that are trying to be made or connect those to what is happening in the present.

Sid: So what can high schools do to boost student literacy?

Julie: I think high schools need to take a four pronged approach such as that outlined in the adolescent literacy support framework. I think they need to address student motivation. Students who have had a history of not being adequate readers and writers are reluctant to risk and develop further their literacy skills. Students who are alienated from their high school studies need to be connected through more responsive classrooms, much more classroom interaction, and many more connections between life and school. In addition, we know strategies that help support and develop literacy skills and teachers need to know those and know how to infuse them into their teaching. That's going to require professional development, the kind that brings teachers together to collaborate and look at student work, and that allows teachers to try out different strategies and come back and discuss their successes and their challenges. Teachers also have to know what literacy demands are particular to their subject areas, what kinds of text structures, what kinds of vocabulary are specific to being able to truly understand the content in their area, and how can they effectively teach those to students. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there need to be organizational structures and leadership capacities set in place to support all of these school wide so that there is a focus on literacy from the top down and the bottom up.

Sid: Now finally tell us what it would look like when there is a high level of literacy when schools are succeeding. Paint a picture for us.

Julie: I think you would walk into a high school environment and it would feel exciting. It would look very different in terms of the level of interaction that was occurring between students and teachers, and among teachers and among students. There would be books everywhere, there would be computers in use, there would be the use of writing for communication, there would be petitions, there would be letters, there would be posters that were generated to communicate messages that were important to the students. You might peek in classrooms and see presentations and see audience critique of presentations. You might see video or dramatic interpretations. And I think the issue is not that these things are not occurring in high schools. The issue is that if high schools were succeeding in terms of supporting literacy, these would be occurring all the time, they would not be special projects or special one time occasions. It would be happening all the time. Reading, writing, speaking and listening would be the lifeblood of the high school, through which all manner of content was explored, and everyone was engaged in the learning process.

Sid: Thank you Julie Meltzer.