Best Practices In Adolescent Literacy Instruction

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Public education, especially at the secondary level, is currently experiencing a powerful increase in focus upon literacy and literacy instruction. Many models of professional development are being employed to ensure that, regardless of discipline, faculty are adapting the best practices of literacy instruction. In The Best Practices of Adolescent Literacy Instruction, Hinchman and Sheridan-Thomas organize the work of 26 contributors to 19 chapters into three sections to guide the reader through the most current approaches to literacy instruction that "cognitive and sociocultural research suggest [are] engaging and effective for youth in grades 5—12" (p.xv). Though the practices discussed are displayed as effective for all adolescents, the work of these contributors has a clear focus on struggling students and schools. Thomas Sabo Charms

The first section of this book discusses current "Perspectives Toward Adolescent Literacy Instruction." The five chapters that are included within this section focus upon the concept of responsive teaching in the field of ...
... literacy. The authors unanimously suggest that nearly all adolescents engage in a variety of literacy practices outside of school and these must be accessed if the student is to succeed within the school. The divide that exists in many classrooms between the reading and writing done in and out of school works only to increase the student's perception that school work is unreal and irrelevant in real world contexts. For this reason, the contributors recommend engaging in responsive teaching by determining what forms of literacy students are practicing at home and finding ways to apply them within the classroom. In "Life: Understanding and Connecting to the Digital Literacies of Adolescents," for example, Dana Wilber suggests incorporating strategies using blogs, Livejournals, webpages, podcasts, and digital pen pals as ways to "build on the expertise of students" and "build bridges between schools and their communities" (p. 73). Another contributor, Shelley Hong Xu, recommends developing intersections between scholastic and personal literacies by developing what she refers to as hybrid spaces or areas connecting the academic works of the school to the interests of the student. She displays this concept through the example of an English language arts unit where students simultaneously analyze characters in the novel Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson and characters on the popular reality television show Survivor. By developing connections such as these, these contributors suggest that educators can build on students' prior knowledge to provide them with analytic frameworks that are useful both in and out of school. Thomas Sabo Packings

This first section concludes with a chapter by David O'Brien in which he summarizes the difficulty of the struggling student adrift in an academic world that appears entirely disconnected from reality: "Struggling students do not expect to gain anything tangible from reading; they read to meet externally established and imposed goals" (p. 89). He explains that even when these students do attempt to meet these external goals, they do not expect a successful outcome. Thus, O'Brien intimates that many struggling students have learned but two things from school: It is irrelevant, and they are not successful within it. For this reason he, along with the other contributors to this book, advocates reestablishing student self-efficacy by accessing the real world literacy practices of adolescents.