Supporting Adolescent Readers

How should middle and high school teachers and leaders think about reading and literacy instruction for adolescents? Far too often, elementary models of reading are applied to adolescents, without much success. Models based on extensive reviews of research in early childhood may not serve adolescents well. Adolescents have different motivations, different experiences with the world and reading, more background knowledge, and different needs when it comes to supports necessary to continue their development as skilled readers.

Thus, teachers of adolescents need an evidence-based model for continuing students’ reading development. Our extensive review of research focused on adolescents, rather than elementary students, suggests that there are several components necessary to support students’ reading journey. It’s important to remember that many of the components of reading are unconstrained skills, meaning that they continue to develop over our lifetime. Chief among these are background knowledge and vocabulary. In other words, being a strong reader in fourth grade does not necessarily mean that a student will be a strong reader in ninth grade—the expectations continue to rise, and new skills need to develop further.

We combined the components of adolescent reading instruction into a framework that we think of as a battery or power cell (see the figure below). Note that the cell is powered by self-efficacy. There are thousands of studies that clearly demonstrate the power of efficacy and the role it plays in learning. Simply put, if students don’t have a goal or don’t believe they have the skills to reach the goal, they are not likely to engage or exert effort. When this happens, otherwise excellent instruction has virtually no impact on student learning.

The Need to Experience Success

Experiencing success is one powerful way to build efficacy. When students experience success, they are motivated to try again. But teachers often tell them that they learn from failure. It’s true, we can learn from failure, but we don’t like it very much. It doesn’t feel good, much less foster self-efficacy, to repeatedly fail. Starting with hard, complex inferences during reading shuts down a lot of students who immediately experience failure and give up.

Adolescents need to regularly experience success, and as they do, the tasks and text can become more complex. For example, when introducing a new text, teachers can begin the lesson with literal questions that ensure student success while reading a complex text. But we don’t leave students there. As the lesson progresses, teachers can ask increasingly complex questions that allow students to apply their literal knowledge to more inferential thinking.

Note that the battery is filled with background knowledge, which remains a significant indicator of comprehension. Teachers should build and activate relevant background knowledge so the texts students are asked to read are more comprehensible. Teachers can build background knowledge through videos, illustrations, and explanations. In addition, teachers can create text sets, with students initially reading less complex texts as they build background knowledge for increasingly complex texts. Figure 2 below contains sample instructional strategies for each of the components of the adolescent reading model.

Component of Adolescent Reading	Sample Strategies
Background knowledge	Videos and illustrations Explanations of key ideas Text sets K-W-L charts (what do I know, what do I want to know, what did I learn?) Advance organizers such as anticipation guides Concept maps and graphic organizers
Word recognition	Sight word instruction with arm tapping Syllable segmenting Fluency routines (choral reading, shared reading)
Word knowledge	Morphology instruction (prefix, suffix, root, base) Teaching word solving (context clues) Word journals Vocabulary self-assessment Word walls
Sentence fluency	Juicy sentence protocols Highlight and parse complex sentences in readings Sentence combining Close reading instruction
Verbal reasoning	Comprehension strategy instruction Complex texts that require inferencing Metacognition instruction Debates and Socratic seminars Classroom discussion

Inside the cell are four aspects that must be addressed as part of the reading instruction students receive in their classes. These apply to all content area classrooms. Stronger readers are not supported by English teachers alone. Instead, every teacher contributes to the reading development of all students. Of course, there are some students who need supplemental and intensive interventions, especially when their foundational skills (phoneme awareness, phonics, or fluency) are still developing. These students require additional time on reading tasks that are more developmental in nature, which can be accomplished through push-in support during class or added time outside of class.

Focusing on Word Recognition

For all students, teachers need to focus on word recognition. This includes decoding multisyllabic words and building students’ sight word vocabularies. There are words in every content area that students simply must recognize by sight. We are not talking about high frequency words (e.g., when, said, could, another) but rather words that need to be recognized instantly so that reading is smooth. These may include words like hypothesis (science), federalism (social studies), aesthetic (art), equation (math), endurance (physical education), and metaphor (English). Through the process of orthographic mapping, students see the word and instantly recognize its pronunciation and meaning. This contributes to their fluent reading and understanding of texts.

Word recognition is related to word knowledge. Students need to recognize the words and know what they mean. In middle and high school, this often requires students to understand that many words have multiple meanings. The words set and prime have meanings outside of the mathematics classroom, as well as specific meanings in that content area. Teachers must help students understand those words so they can apply appropriate word meanings as they engage with texts. Building students’ depth and breadth of word knowledge is critical as words represent the concepts we understand. Ultimately, words are labels for concepts. Thus, teachers should teach concepts first and then label those concepts. Asking students to memorize suffrage when they have no concept about it is nearly impossible. Instead, teaching the concept through examples and exemplars allows students to apply the label to the concept and remember it.

Words are critical but we read them in connected sentences. Note that sentence analysis is not part of elementary models but is a critical aspect of adolescent literacy. Understanding syntax and grammar are required aspects of reading for understanding. Words do not occur in isolation and sometimes meaning is influenced by the context and word placement in a sentence. Protocols such as introducing students to “juicy sentences” (complex sentences with tons of information) allow teachers to parse the sentence and explore various aspects such as noun phrases, adverbial clauses, academic vocabulary, voice, referents, clauses, and other aspects of written language that contribute to complexity. In addition, close readings of complex texts allow students to apply their word knowledge in longer pieces of text. Close reading involves students annotating the text and re-reading and discussing the text while considering a range of text-dependent questions that generally focus on three levels of thinking:

• Literal: What does the text say? (Focused on key details and general understanding.)
• Structural: How does the text work? (Focused on words in context, text structure, author’s purpose, and author’s craft, such as genre, point of view, and literary devices.)
• Inferential: What does the text mean? (Making logical inferences and connections between texts.)

And readers must put this all together to make sense of the text.

The final aspect of our reading model is verbal reasoning, which may sound strange given that we’re focused on reading and not speaking. But readers use their oral reasoning skills as they engage with texts. Verbal reasoning is the ability to infer to find logical coherence in a text. It involves understanding concepts as they are framed in words, especially in terms of making inferences and understanding figurative language such as metaphors and idioms. For some students, it’s a piece of cake. For others, they get by the skin of their teeth. Notice what we just did? We tapped into your verbal reasoning skills to make our point. Verbal reasoning requires instruction in implied messages, referents (often through pronouns referring backwards or forwards to something specific, figurative language, and multiple-meaning words in the English language).

Conclusion

Middle and high school teachers can have a significant impact on students’ reading development. Models from elementary school should be updated and adapted for the secondary level to reflect the evidence about adolescent reading. To that end, instructional design in middle and high schools should include each aspect of the reading battery so that educators can empower students to become efficacious individuals who want to learn to read more and better.

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Douglas Fisher is a professor and chair of educational leadership at San Diego State University and a teacher leader at Health Sciences High. Previously, he was a teacher and professional development coordinator. Nancy Frey is a professor of educational leadership at San Diego State University and a teacher leader at Health Sciences High. Previously, she was a teacher, academic coach, and central office resource coordinator.

References

Ehri, L.C. (2014). Orthographic mapping in the acquisition of sight word reading, spelling memory, and vocabulary learning. Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(1), 5–21. doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2013.819356

Fillmore, L.W., & Fillmore, C.J. (n.d.). What does text complexity mean for English learners and language minority students? Understanding Language. ul.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/resource/2021-12/06-LWF%20CJF%20Text%20Complexity%20FINAL_0.pdf

Fisher, D., Frey, N., Anderson, H., & Thayre, M. (2015). Text-dependent questions: Pathways to close and critical reading, grades 6–12. Corwin.

Fisher, D., Frey, N., Ortega, S., Barbee, K., & Allen-Rotell, A. (2025). Teaching foundational skills to adolescent readers. Corwin.

Student Achievement Partners. (n.d.). Juicy sentence guidance. achievethecore.org/content/upload/Juicy%20Sentence%20Guidance.pdf