More to Know: Adolescents Crave Social Connection Early adolescence and the shift to middle school represent a significant milestone for most students. In addition to encountering more demanding literacy challenges across the disciplines, middle school students experience a multi-faceted relationship with reading and writing—both at school and at home. Adolescents crave social connection. For young teens, literacy is shaped by popular culture, family influences, and relationships with their peers (Ivey and Johnston, 2013; Moje, 2007; Gruwell, 2014). Their texts include logos, music, magazines, websites, and popular and classical literature—as well as the ubiquitous social media. Engagement is a central force in adolescent literacy learning. It’s simple cause and effect: adolescents who see something of value in school reading, read and enjoy academic success. And those who don’t, don’t read and typically fall behind. John Guthrie, education psychologist and literacy researcher, has been at the forefront of research on reading engagement (2008). From his research and that of others, we know that reading disengagement is more often than not the root cause of school failure and dropouts. Today’s adolescents, given their 24/7 plugged-in status, texting, tweeting, and tinkering with their digital profiles, might claim, “reading is my life.” A study by the Pew Research Center (Lenhart, 2015) reports that a “typical teen sends and receives 30 texts per day. For older girls, 15-17, the number climbs to 50 texts a day.” What’s more, aided by the convenience of smartphones, “92% of teens report going online daily—including 24% who say they go online ‘almost constantly.’” As Krashen (2011) reminds us, all that digital reading and writing represents self-selected “narrow reading,” which maximizes language and literacy development. Krashen explains that “narrow reading means focusing on one topic, author, or genre according to the reader’s interests.” Inviting kids to zero in on texts that hold the greatest interest nearly “guarantees interest and comprehensibility because of the reader’s greater background knowledge.” Series books represent a kind of narrow reading and often, for this reason, offer a great source of pleasure for young or challenged readers. Over time, narrow readers expand their interests. What Adolescents Need In 2012, the International Reading Association (IRA) issued a position paper on adolescent literacy, defining it as “the ability to read, write, understand and interpret, and discuss multiple texts across multiple contexts.” The IRA recognizes literacy as flexible and multiple-dimensional; it may manifest as traditional print or fluid digital and appear as a book, instant message, text, video game, or social media, “all of which can be used as tools for understanding content as well as forming social relationships.”
Our 21st-century expansive world of literacy requires dynamic instruction to match. The IRA
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CHAPTER 1: READERS
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