This report provides basic information on reading, including an overview of critical literacy skills such as decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension. Its focus is to support middle and high school teachers, as well as administrators and parents, in building adolescents’ skills in reading and writing. Topics are divided into user-friendly categories such as: What challenges face adolescent readers? How can instruction help the adolescent reader? What do we still need to know? It also includes summaries of current research and recommendations for classroom instruction and addresses student motivation and the role of assessments (formative, summative and diagnostic) in supporting literacy development. The appendices include additional instructional tools and resources such as graphic and semantic organizers, summarization and comprehension strategies, and think-alouds.
