The "Crisis" in Adolescent Literacy

I’d like to talk about the supposed “crisis” in Adolescent literacy. One of the things that I’ve consistently heard throughout my degree is that children from ages 10-18 don’t read. They have trouble reading, they have less advanced vocabularies, they can’t comprehend basic texts…the list goes on and on.

   Surveys done of High School juniors and seniors reveal that our students feel less prepared to go on to college. They feel like they haven’t learned the skills they need with regards to reading and writing to really succeed. On the other end of the spectrum, most students (particularly boys) hit a slump in fourth grade. Formerly voracious readers throw down their books and say “This just isn’t fun for me anymore.” Some of them pick it back up, and some of them don’t. For many educators, this is a source of concern and a topic to devote an entire conference to. I feel the same way, but for different reasons.

     Some of you may be familiar with Lisa Delpit’s landmark work Other People’s Children. If you’re not, seriously- go read it. It changes your life. In the book, she suggests that the reason African American Students aren’t succeeding is because the education system marginalizes their home language by insisting that the cultural  norms of standard English are the only correct way to think, talk, and write. She suggests that schools and educators who give credence to other cultures in the classroom by studying how the student’s native dialect is different from Standard English actually boosts achievement and encourages students to buy into the educational process. She also believes that allowing students to sometimes write in their native dialect/language gives them more of a “voice.”

   Why is this important, you ask? Well, let’s go back to the supposed “crisis” in adolescent literacy. We have students that aren’t reading our district’s curriculums (be they basals, novels, etc) instead, they’re reading scrolling text in video games, blogs, twitter feeds, facebook updates and text messages. Each one of these digital texts requires a different schema, new story grammar and a new form of English. Our students have adapted to this quite nicely. One might even say they are fluent in a new dialect of English. 

  Then they come to school and in a lot of cases are reading stories from a curriculum that has been in place for 7-10 years.  Instead of reading screens, they’re picking up books- which to them seems terribly old fashioned. If you’re a child who has been raised on screens, where’s your motivation to pick up a paper book? If I’m reading the Great Gatsby in freshman English (which for some reason persists in being taught, purely on the fact that it’s a classic, even though it has no relevance to today’s students) am I going to page through a book or go look at it online? 

     I believe that the reason students are feeling less prepared for college these days is precisely because Universities have made the move to technologically based instruction while our grade schools and high schools are lagging behind. Students see the curriculum of “classics” as a barrier, and this is why reading is termed boring.

    My solution? Start integrating digital texts. There are plenty of curriculums out there that have digital components. Students can read on the computer, play phonics games and improve their fluency in a digital world. High School kids could be encouraged to read relevant “new classics” by young adult authors. Start talking about graphic novels. Talk about crictical media literacy (which is a subject for a another post). Students need to know that their experiences outside of the classroom are valued and the best way we can show that is by integrating them in. Thoughts?