The Challenges of Working With Adolescent Readers

As children progress through elementary school and enter middle and high school, their range of motivation, interests, skills, and abilities, continue to expand. This expanding divergence among students requires teachers to not only become aware of these differences, but to be able to make appropriate corresponding adjustments to instruction.  Let’s take a look at the major challenges in working with adolescent readers… 

Motivation and Interests

Teachers of adolescent students know that their students have a wide range of motivation and interests. Some students may still possess the high levels of interest and curiosity they exhibited in elementary grades, or their motivation may have dulled or become highly selective. They may have favorite subjects, topics, and activities or exhibit little excitement for any type of classroom work. The topics that motivate them may be influenced by gender preferences, age-related interests, cultural/ethnic influences, peer influences, popular culture, games and sports, television, the media, and most importantly, the internet. 

Effective teachers of adolescent students know the value of learning what motivates and interests their students and use that information to create motivational learning experiences.

Decoding and Comprehension Skills

As children enter the middle and high school, they come with a wide range of reading skills. Some may have acquired an impressive sight vocabulary and employ effective strategies to attack new words, while others have limited vocabularies and struggle to decode grade level appropriate text. Their comprehension can also vary greatly, from several years below to considerably higher than grade level performance. An additional challenge occurs when students attempt to read a greater amount of non-fiction or expository text. For the most part, the elementary grades focus on fictional narratives. As students reach the middle and high school grades, they are expected to be able to read an increasing amount of expository text.  Reading assignments in science and social studies present texts that are organized differently than narrative and have denser concepts, more unfamiliar content, specialized vocabulary, and graphic information, e.g., diagrams, chart, tables, and maps.

Effective teachers of adolescent students gather informal data on students’ performance in these areas and use that information to make adjustments in grouping, material, and instruction.

Conceptual Knowledge

Because of differences in ability, interests, past schooling, and out of school experiences, students enter the middle and high school grades with a wide range of differences in what they already know. In both language arts and other content areas, students vary greatly in their prior knowledge.  Some students have favorite authors, belong to book clubs, are frequent visitors to the school and local library, access the Internet for information related to their interests, and have traveled extensively with their parents.  Other students may be extensive and passive consumers of TV, active participants in video games, or have had little direct experiences as the result of travel. Because of these differences some students are quite knowledgeable about insects, space, computers, dinosaurs, aircraft, pets, etc., while others lack that general knowledge.

Effective teachers of adolescent students informally assess these prior knowledge differences and account for them in grouping, instruction, and materials.

Responding Skills

Just as students vary widely in motivation, reading skills, and conceptual knowledge, they also exhibit considerable differences in their preferences and skills in responding to instruction. While the traditional oral and written responses work well with many students and in many situations, some students exhibit low interest and skill in participating in the teacher/student questioning, boardwork, textbook assignments, workbooks and other traditional forms of responding. Howard Gardner’s work on multiple intelligences (1993) and Rita Dunn’s studies on learning styles (1975, 1993) have helped us broaden our understanding of other avenues for both instruction and student response. 

Effective teachers of adolescent students are aware of differences in responding skills and incorporate opportunities for students to express themselves and demonstrate learning in a variety of ways.