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Home > Reading Topics A-Z > I Couldn't Put It Down: Captivating the Hearts and Minds of Adolescent Readers

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I Couldn't Put It Down: Captivating the Hearts and Minds of Adolescent Readers

What can I do to motivate my student to read and build his confidence and literacy skills?

What Students Say…

In interviews with researchers (McCray, 2001), low-level readers challenged the common myth that middle school readers are apathetic, choosing easier activities over reading. These students were doubtful about their future success as adults, but still hoped their reading skills would improve, saying to their teachers:

• I would learn more if I read more for myself.
• Understand that I am afraid to read and the fear makes me crazy.
• Sit down and read with me during or after school, because I don't want the other kids to think that something is wrong with me.
• Don't put me in reading groups. I would rather you work with me by myself.
• Bring me more books, and let me read things that I want to read.

What Can Tutors and Mentors Do?

You can provide many positive supports that directly address these student concerns, including:

• More time for reading one-on-one
• Broader reading selections keyed to student interests
• Demonstrations of strategies and coaching
• Consistent, positive encouragement to read

Job One in Adolescent Literacy: Coaching for Reading Comprehension

If you ask a really good swimmer to describe his thinking process as he swims, you'll get answers like, I don't think, I just do. Good readers are also on automatic pilot as they move through text; they have internalized important thinking strategies and use them automatically. But poor readers are like this seventh-grader: Look, I just don't get it, so let's drop it. Like what should I do, anyway? I don't have a clue…

What do successful readers do?

Like swimming, reading is an active process that requires participation to make meaning. Proficient readers use fundamental thinking strategies to understand text. They:

• Activate prior knowledge
• Analyze formats
• Visualize
• Form predictions
• Make inferences
• Generate questions
• Monitor understanding
• Fix confusion
• Synthesize content

Researchers agree that the most powerful help for struggling readers includes explicit instruction in these thinking strategies, such as:

• Naming and describing each strategy
• Modeling each type of thinking (see "What are think-alouds?")
• Practicing with youth until they can use each strategy independently (Beers, 2003, p. 27).

How Can Tutors Help? Planning Scaffolded Reading Experiences

Poor readers often lack the automatic thinking strategies that lead to text comprehension. Guided conversations about reading, with opportunities to identify, practice, and internalize key mental habits, will improve their skills. A scaffolded reading experience refers to a plan of activities (before, during, and after reading) to engage readers in specific thinking strategies as they encounter texts.

Picture a scaffold on a building- a framework that anchors the structure and gives workers access; it's temporary and when workers no longer need it, the scaffold comes down. A reading scaffold is built by the tutor as he explains, demonstrates, and coaches specific thinking strategies; the structure supports the development of comprehension as the student reads. Gradually, the coaching (scaffold) is withdrawn as the reader achieves independent use of the strategies.

Comprehension Strategies

Thinking strategy Mental process used by good readers	Description What the mental process entails	Questions Questions that promote this thinking strategy
Activate Prior Knowledge	Recall previous experience and knowledge, making connections with text content, meaning, and style	What has happened in your life that is like this story? What have you read about or seen that relates to this topic?
Analyze Formats	Predict characteristics and content of a book based on a review of formats — organization, graphics, and presentation of the text	Based on the title, cover, and table of contents, headings, charts, tables, and pictures, what do you think this book is about? Can you predict what will be in each section?
Visualize	Identify and describe mental pictures and images that occur to the reader as text is read	What pictures or images pop into your head about a desert? Can you imagine what the scene/person/item looks like?
Form Predictions	Apply growing knowledge of author and content to predict story developments or upcoming content	What clues are in the story about what will happen next? Based on the information we've read, what else will the author(s) discuss?
Make Inferences	Combine analysis of the text with what you know of the world to form educated guesses about meaning	What is the characters' relationship, based on the information we've read, what else will the author(s) discuss?
Generate Questions	Wonder about text — what's the purpose, why this detail, what's missing, and what remains to be learned?	What questions do you have about what's coming up in the story? Does the chart on this page make you wonder anything else?
Monitor Understanding	Identify points of confusion about the text and analyze why they occur	Where did you lose track of what's happening in the story? Are there terms/ideas you don't understand on this page?
Fix Confusion	Apply fix-up strategies for areas of confusion so that reading can continue	Can you reread that paragraph and look for clues about what's confusing you? What words do you need to know more about to be able to move on?
Synthesize Content	Identify main ideas, summarize content, identify contrasts, and make comparisons	Can you summarize the main points of this article in a few sentences? How are the main characters in each story the same? How are they different?

Not Just for English Class: Literacy Support Across the Curriculum

Literacy coaching can occur in many contexts. It can be an integral part of tutoring in other content areas and a range of out-of-school time activities. We can see one approach to incorporating literacy coaching into a science unit through the weekly tutoring log below. Keeping a session-by-session record of tutor/tutee interaction is important-documenting your tutee's work and progress, guiding a replacement if you are absent, or providing samples of your work to other tutors and supervisors.

Working with middle and high-school students sometimes requires tutors to learn something new or brush up on forgotten information. When Vadim, a seventh-grader, brought books on the weather to his tutor, Sharon, she didn't remember much about the topic. To prepare, she found some resources, like Weather for Dummies, at her public library. Here's her record of a week's work, including tutoring plans and notes about her student's responses.

Scaffolded reading plan for Weather unit: Week one

Vladim brought a textbook on water/weather. He needs help understanding terms and concepts, is working with a team in school, and wants ideas for a report.

Session # Day/Date	Session Plan	Student Response
Session 1 Monday	Analyze text structure: Review both books with V, look at headings, read the charts, talk about pictures. Ask: What is his team doing in school? What parts of these books are most important Monitor understanding: Where is V most confused? Where is the best place to start? Notes: Look on Internet for weather forecast sites, videotape weather forecasts; next session, review cloud types, high/low pressure.	V says team members will be weather forecasters, each member to create a different forecast and weather map. V confused by cloud types and high/low pressure, needs to know how to read weather prediction maps (synoptic charts).
Session 2 Tuesday	Visualize: Work with cloud names/pictures helping V to associate cloud images and name; then draw cloud types with chalk on dark paper (save and label). Discuss connection between cloud types and high/low pressure. Form predictions: Show tapes of weather forecasts discuss the high/low pressure parts (rewind if needed). Look at synoptic chart in textbook; work with V to connect satellite pictures (from TV) with textbook weather charts; try to predict weather based on high/low pressure areas. Show him Internet sites that will help. Notes: Bring in outside resources on weather conditions/reports. Review chapter vocabulary.	V could remember best when we "drew" cloud types with our hands first, then on paper. V wants topic ideas for his weather report-interested in tornadoes (has been in one). Others he likes: sunny/hot and ice storm.
Session 3 Thursday	Word sort: Do a word sort with V, using main vocabulary from chapter as a review Report brainstorm: Ask how team assigned topics (What V got); then go through V's topic in all books, looking for good ideas. Notes: Plan "tornado in a bottle" experiment- may aid understanding or be useful in report	V still confuses climate with weather conditions- desert is not "weather." The sort helped out. V's topic is tornadoes (he's excited). We made a good list of tornado topics to explore

Looking over this schedule, we see that Sharon's tutoring plan incorporated several effective practices. She:

• Took initiative to learn about the topic herself
• Located additional resources
• Planned sessions around Vadim's concerns and classroom expectations
• Incorporated literacy support-both comprehension strategies and vocabulary work
• Integrated "daily use" resources (the taped TV forecasts)
• Added hands-on activities (drawing clouds, tornado in a bottle)

Building Vocabulary Across the Content Areas

Many adolescents, especially English language learners, benefit from focus on specific vocabulary. Vocabulary development and reading comprehension are interdependent: The best readers have the largest vocabularies and poor readers typically have limited vocabularies. Simply identifying an unknown word and looking it up in the dictionary is an ineffective way to increase vocabulary. But when students use vocabulary words repeatedly to construct meaning in new text, they learn and retain word meanings longer (several studies cited in Allen, 1999, Stahl, 1999, and Beers, 2003).

Choosing vocabulary words

Vocabulary work in tutoring sessions will be most successful using the texts your student is reading. Remembering adolescents' sensitivity and need to feel confident, which question would you ask: What words don't you know? What words do you need help with? What words would you like to know more about? The final choice is best-this question puts the learner in charge and challenges her to learn more.

Beyond the Dictionary: Strategies for Finding Word Meanings

As you read together, ask your tutee to identify words she wants to learn more about. Before using the dictionary, introduce basic strategies for figuring out word meanings from the surrounding text. Prompt your student to:

• Substitute some other word that would make sense
• Reread the sentence(s) before and after the word for clues
• Identify parts of the word she recognizes
• Look for other words in the passage that might be related, refer to something similar, or are synonyms or antonyms

Once struggling readers understand how to approximate word meanings from context clues, they will begin to pick up vocabulary as they read (Stahl, 1999). At this point, more reading time and broader selections will be the main ways readers learn new words. However, English language learners and other students with low language exposure will also benefit from direct vocabulary instruction.

Word Cards: Collecting and Reusing Vocabulary Throughout Your Year

When students create word cards they go deeper into the significance and uses of a word, and accumulate a tangible "deck" of vocabulary words-satisfying evidence of progress as the pile grows throughout the year. Word cards take time, so selections should be limited to words critical to current reading. Troposphere might be an important word to a study unit on weather, accomplice for a crime novel, and obsolete for a unit on industry. To create word cards, ask your student to write the word at the center of an index card, filling out each corner of the card as illustrated.

Return to these cards (shuffle the deck each session) and use the words regularly and in different contexts to make efforts pay off. For our example, obsolete, here's a follow-up conversation you might provide: Okay Jason, if I go through my desk drawers, I'll find some obsolete stuff-like old checkbooks from banks in other cities. What obsolete stuff do you hang onto?

Group adaptation

As each student accumulates a personal word deck, allow him to share with peers, drawing cards and creating new contexts for using the word during group meetings. Students will pick up additional words from each others' collections.

Word Trees: Mapping Relationships From Root Words

Another effective approach to vocabulary development is working with word families. ones that share similar roots, prefixes, or suffixes. Knowledge of root words provides students with powerful tools to predict meaning for many similar words (Beers, 2003). If you are working on a unit about transportation, port is an important root word to consider. To create a word tree, draw a tree (or use NWREL's template) and write the root word on the trunk, along with definitions. Ask the student to:

• Add a branch for every word he can think of that contains the root word
• Write each of these words on a branch, along with a definition
• Add a sentence using the word
• Add twigs to the branch for people you hear using the word

Here are just a few additional root words that have many derivatives in secondary curriculum: hydro-, hypo-, geo-, bio-, astro-, arch-, tract-, phono-, meter-, and tox-.

Group adaptation

Students have fun with word trees; they like to see who can create the most complicated ones, and creative use of the words in sentences provides entertainment. Creating word trees on butcher paper and posting them on walls can be a productive after-school activity, especially if students work on different root words and share their progress.

Word Sorts: Recognizing Relationships Among Key Concepts

Word sorts, done with sticky notes or index cards on the wall, can be a nice break from reading text. Because the activity requires sorting words by their characteristics, content areas that require analytical thinking work well. Word sorts need to be planned in advance. To create a word sort for your youth, start with index cards or sticky notes in two different colors:

• Select a subject area and identify 15.20 words common to the subject, but with different characteristics
• Write one word each on sticky notes or index cards of the same color
• Stick or tape them to the wall in random order
• For a closed sort (tutor determines the categories) write the categories for the sort on a second color of sticky notes/cards and tape them to the wall in a row
• For an open sort (youth determines the categories) ask the student to study the words and create the category cards
• Sort the words by grouping the word cards under the categories

Here are examples for science and math: Meteorology: stratus, temperate, sunshine, cumulonimbus, wind, tropical, lenticular, polar, fog, cirrus, snow, Mediterranean, hail, stratocumulus, savannah, desert, and thunder. Closed sort categories: clouds, climates, weather. Open sort categories: weather forecast, places with weather, words I don't know.

Geometry: Circle, diameter, angle, radius, rectangle, area, pi, trapezoid, square root, oval, ellipse, axis, equation, semi-circle, parallelogram, triangle. Closed sort categories: round figures, angular figures, computations. Open sort categories: things I can draw, terms I know, what to learn.

Word sorts are particularly effective for content area learning because they encourage students to analyze and create categories for groups of related words. The tutor also gains insight into how the youth thinks about words. Word sorts can be accomplished in many different ways; often, there is no totally "right" answer to a sort, but the activity encourages focused dialogue about what words mean. Appropriate resources for the subject area (dictionaries, textbooks, manuals) are critical tools to have on hand, so that areas of uncertainty can be investigated and resolved.

Group adaptation

In an out-of-school time setting, students can work on word sorts in teams, observe other student versions, and share observations about their choices. Once the group understands how word sorts work, they often develop enthusiasm for creating their own versions.

Concept Definition Map: Help With Common Academic Words

Many words are commonly used in classrooms across the content areas; students who have trouble with them may suffer confusion in many academic areas. Think of how often we use words/phrases like: compare and contrast, integrate, regulate, summarize, calculate, categorize, compute, and search the Net. Providing an opportunity for students to talk about these words and form broader concepts about their meaning can provide needed confidence and boost academic performance.

A concept definition map is a way of charting what these core academic words mean, how they are used in different contexts, and also what they are not.

To create a concept definition map, ask students to work from their own knowledge first, and then consult resources to:

• Write the concept word in the center box
• Write the definition in the box above it
• Write synonyms or similar words down the righthand side
• Write antonyms or dissimilar words down the lefthand side
• Write examples of the word (different contexts) in the three bottom boxes

See an example and download a template here.

References