The Challenges of Adolescent Literacy

1. The Challenges of Adolescent Literacy Lowry Hemphill Wheelock College CCDD Summer Institute August 2011

2. In our Catalyzing Comprehension through Discussion and Debate project we’ve taken on grades 4-8 • What happens with the task demands of reading across these grade levels? • Is our CCDD focus relevant to new reading challenges across grades 4-8?

3. CCDD’s focus in grades 4-8 • Academic language • Complex reasoning • Perspective taking • Motivation

4. Let’s compare two texts: • Class Clown by Johanna Hurwitz lexile 670 • Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco Stork lexile 700

5. Class Clown by Johanna Hurwitz is appropriate for students at the beginning of our grade span 4-8 • Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco Stork is appropriate for students near the end of our grade span 4-8

6. Although Class Clown and Marcelo in the Real World have similar lexile levels, they vary in important other dimensions of challenge • From previewing several pages from each book, what differences do we see in the reader’s task in making sense of each?

7. What’s the reader’s task in making sense of Class Clown and Marcelo in the Real World? • What makes Marcelo in the Real World more challenging than Class Clown despite similar lexiles?

8. Reading literature: Shifts in task demands from 4th to 8th grade • Characters become less predictable • We need to learn about characters more through the text; we can rely less on personal experience • Settings move away from the everyday • We get much more access to characters’ internal worlds: thoughts, feelings • Author’s purpose (where is this heading?) is deliberately more up for grabs

9. Excerpt from the adult short story collection, “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” by David Foster Wallace • Looking at this challenging adult work of literature, what’s the reader’s task?

10. The dimensions of text challenge we saw in Marcelo in the Real World are even more characteristic of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men • Texts for readers at the upper end of our 4-8 grade span are starting to incorporate the challenging aspects of adult literary fiction

11. NAEP Reading Assessments • U. S. has a system of voluntary national assessments called the NAEP • NAPE is given in grades 4, 8, and high school every couple of years • NAEP defines reading competencies expected at different grade levels • These show contrasts in what readers are expected to be able to do in 4th and 8th grades

12. NAEP 4th grade proficient readers can: • Compare two characters’ feelings across texts • Recognize explicitly stated information that explains a character’s feelings • Recognize information that describes a character’s behavior • Recognize specific details that support a generalization

13. NAEP 8th grade proficient readers can: • Interpret the speaker’s perspective in lines of a poem • Identify multiple viewpoints in an expository text • Connect character descriptions in a poem and a story • Interpret uses of figurative language

14. NAEP expectations and the CCDD program • CCDD’s focus on perspective-taking is clearly part of skilled reading in both 4th and 8th grade • CCDD’s focus on complex reasoning is part of skilled reading in 4th grade and becomes a larger part of NAEP defined skilled reading by 8th grade

15. How do NAEP expectations shift? • Expectations for 8th grade include even more perspective taking • 8th grade expectations include a focus on the author’s perspective as well as characters’ perspectives • 8th grade expectations include making judgments about perspective in new genres: poetry, nonfiction

16. CCDD focus is relevant to upper grade reading demands that include: • Academic language • Complex reasoning • Perspective taking • Motivation