Rethinking Adolescent Literacy: What We’ve Been Missing and What Our Secondary Teachers Truly Need

A new blog post is live. This one is close to my heart: adolescent literacy, the myths that have held students back, and the shifts that can truly change trajectories.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about adolescent literacy—what it really means, why it matters, and what it will take to truly support our secondary teachers.

Across the country, middle and high school classrooms are filled with students who never received what they needed early on: explicit instruction in foundational reading skills. Many of these students still struggle to decode single-syllable words. Others have never been taught how to break apart multisyllabic words—the kind of words that dominate content-area texts. And layered on top of that, years of balanced literacy, reliance on leveled texts, and an emphasis on “reading skills” over knowledge building have left students with massive knowledge gaps. For far too long, students were placed in systems that limited their exposure to complex syntax, academic vocabulary, and the content knowledge that fuels comprehension.

They were surrounded by text but rarely given the tools—or the opportunity—to rise to it.

The Myth and Harm of Leveled Texts

For decades, the leveled-text system promised teachers an elegant solution: give students books “at their level,” keep them comfortable, and let them slowly progress upward. It felt intuitive. It felt safe. And it felt supportive. But as Shanahan in his book Leveled Text, Leveled Lives, has made painfully clear, it was built on a flawed premise—and it produced deeply inequitable outcomes.

Leveled texts did not simply slow down reading progress. They capped it.

Students assigned lower-level books were fed a steady diet of simplified language, predictable patterns, and reduced cognitive demand. This meant they rarely encountered the kinds of linguistic structures—complex sentences, morphology, academic vocabulary—that actually develop reading ability. Over time, students internalized these levels in ways that shaped their academic identities. Shanahan explains that the system didn’t just level books—it leveled children’s perceptions of themselves. A student who spent years on “Level J” or “Level M” carried that label like a shadow, and by adolescence, those labels had become ceilings.

But the most damaging part of the leveled-text movement was this: students spent years reading books selected for “skills practice,” not books selected to build knowledge. They read stories designed to practice predicting, or finding the main idea, or identifying text features. They were reading—but they weren’t learning. Their reading lives were built around skills, not substance. As a result, they missed out on the content knowledge, academic vocabulary, and background experiences that are essential for understanding complex text in the upper grades.

When we look at the adolescents who enter secondary school unable to comprehend grade-level material, the roots of the problem are often not adolescent at all. They are early instructional choices—particularly the reliance on leveled texts—that kept students in simplified language during the years when their knowledge base should have been expanding.

Background Knowledge: The Foundation of Understanding

One of the most misunderstood truths about reading is that comprehension is a transferable, one-size-fits-all skill. This idea is false. Students do not become better comprehenders by practicing “main idea” across random texts. They become better comprehenders when they can connect what they read to the knowledge they already possess.

To understand a text, students must be able to grasp the surface meaning of the sentences, hold ideas in their working memory, and connect those ideas to existing knowledge to form a coherent mental model. This process is heavy, demanding cognitive work—and it depends profoundly on background knowledge. When a student knows little about a topic, every new sentence feels like starting from zero. Their mental model stays fragile. Their comprehension collapses quickly.

This is why knowledge is not a bonus or an enrichment—it is the oxygen that comprehension breathes. Students build knowledge when they are immersed in rich, complex content: science concepts, historical events, world systems, literary traditions, vocabulary tied to real ideas. They build knowledge when texts stretch them—when reading is not just decoding, but thinking, integrating, questioning, and synthesizing.

But students who spent years in leveled-text programs were denied this. Their reading diet consisted of books chosen not for their substance but for their “level.” They read texts chosen to match a skill, not texts chosen to deepen knowledge. It’s no surprise, then, that many enter adolescence with shallow background knowledge, weak vocabulary, and almost no experience with the language structures of complex text.

Even when students can decode the words on the page, they often cannot integrate them into meaningful understanding because the knowledge base the text requires simply isn’t there. And this isn’t a student failure—it’s a system failure.

The good news? Knowledge can be built. And secondary classrooms are some of the richest places to build it.

Content-Area Literacy vs. Disciplinary Literacy

For years, schools blurred the line between these two concepts, but they are not interchangeable.

Content-area literacy refers to general strategies—main idea, prediction, inference—taught across subjects. These are not harmful, but they are insufficient.

Disciplinary literacy, as Shanahan emphasizes, is something entirely different. It recognizes that every subject has its own ways of constructing knowledge. Historians source and corroborate. Scientists evaluate evidence and follow precise language. Mathematicians read symbolic representations and logical sequences. Each discipline has its own language, its own habits of mind, and its own reading demands.

When we ask content-area teachers to stop teaching their content in order to teach generic literacy skills, we strip the discipline of its meaning. But when we empower them to teach students how their discipline thinks, literacy becomes authentic, purposeful, and transformative.

What This Means for Secondary Teachers

It means reclaiming content as the center of instruction. It means recognizing that literacy is not something added to science, history, or math—it lives within them. It means choosing strategies that help students access and think deeply about disciplinary ideas, not generic skill drills detached from meaning.

When teachers focus on their content—their real content—and use literacy practices that authentically support it, students not only learn more; they comprehend more. They expand their knowledge base. They accumulate the background knowledge that they were denied for so many years.

Key Strategies That Build Knowledge and Strengthen Comprehension in Every Discipline

When secondary teachers refocus on content, they still need practical, discipline-appropriate tools that help students access complex ideas. These tools should not rehearse generic “skills,” but instead deepen vocabulary, strengthen conceptual understanding, and align with the authentic ways experts think in each field. Three such approaches—semantic gradients, Frayer models, and integrated close reading paired with explicit writing instruction—support adolescent learners in ways that build knowledge rather than merely practice strategies.

Semantic gradients help students understand nuance and conceptual relationships among words, which is essential for disciplines where precision matters. When students arrange and explain terms along a continuum of meaning, they develop a deeper sense of how ideas connect and differ. In science, for example, students might map a gradient such as warm → hot → boiling when examining heat transfer, allowing them to recognize thresholds and changes in state. In social studies, arranging terms like protest → resistance → rebellion → revolution helps students analyze political movements and understand their escalation. In mathematics, a gradient like estimate → approximate → calculate → solve clarifies the level of precision required for different tasks. Through these gradients, students begin constructing the background knowledge they need to comprehend increasingly complex texts and ideas.

Frayer models provide a second layer of support by pushing students to break apart essential concepts and reconstruct them with clarity. This structure—definition, characteristics, examples, and non-examples—forces students to move beyond surface-level identification. Science teachers might use a Frayer model for “ecosystem,” guiding students to distinguish it from isolated organisms and identify the interdependent systems within it. Social studies teachers can use the model to deepen understanding of terms like “federalism,” clarifying how power is shared and how it differs from monarchy or confederation. In mathematics, a Frayer model for “linear function” helps students connect graphs, equations, and real-world representations while identifying features that make relationships non-linear. This type of conceptual unpacking is especially powerful for adolescents with knowledge gaps, because it rebuilds the foundation they were denied.

Close reading and explicit writing instruction, when used authentically within a discipline, create the conditions for students to integrate these concepts into meaningful understanding. This is not the generic close reading of ELA skill packets, but discipline-specific work that helps students notice what matters in the text and articulate their thinking. In science, a teacher might guide students through a short, information-dense paragraph on convection, prompting them to underline causal language and track the sequence of events. Students then write a short explanation—“Convection occurs when…”—making the mechanism visible in their own words. In mathematics, close reading might involve analyzing a worked example, noticing why each step is justified, and writing a brief explanation of the logic, helping students articulate mathematical reasoning rather than memorizing procedures. In social studies, students might closely read two primary sources about the same event, annotating for perspective and sourcing. They then write a short paragraph explaining how the authors’ backgrounds influence their interpretations—a central historical skill.

These integrated practices do something that isolated literacy strategies never

could. They help students construct knowledge, not just practice “skills.” They deepen understanding of disciplinary concepts while simultaneously strengthening vocabulary, reasoning, and comprehension. And most importantly, they give adolescents access to the intellectual work of the discipline itself—something many of them have been excluded from for years.

Conclusion: A Way Forward That Restores Purpose, Possibility, and Equity

Adolescent literacy is not a crisis of effort or motivation. It is the result of instructional practices that denied students the things reading requires most: explicit foundational instruction and access to knowledge-rich, complex text. Our older students do not need more isolated skills instruction or another year of texts chosen to match a “level.” They need knowledge. They need language. They need access. They need content.

When we reposition content as the heart of secondary learning and restore disciplinary literacy as the engine of comprehension, teachers begin to feel purposeful again. Students begin to feel capable. And classrooms begin to feel like places where learning is deep, meaningful, and connected.

Because when we align adolescent literacy with the truth about how comprehension works, we don’t just raise scores—we restore opportunity. We rebuild confidence. We give students access to the world they have been locked out of.

And ultimately, we give them something far greater than skill: We give them possibility. We give them hope. We give them back their futures.

We rewrite trajectories—and we rewrite lives.

When we know better, we teach better.

See you next Sunday!

References

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