How High School Teachers Can Support Students with Reading Difficulties

By Jeanne Wanzek

High school students with reading difficulties face incredible challenges navigating content learning. Content-area teachers in disciplines such as social studies seek to cultivate students who can identify and communicate key ideas, provide explanations of and evidence for these ideas, and evaluate differing perspectives on a topic by assessing evidence and claims. These crucial goals require active engagement of students to obtain a great deal of new content knowledge and to assimilate it with their existing background knowledge. In addition, students need to learn and use the language of the discipline, read and understand text within the discipline, and actively apply their newly obtained knowledge to reasoning and decision-making tasks.

However, across the United States there are students in nearly every class who have not achieaved proficiency in reading by the time they enter high school.1 These students face significant barriers in preparing for college, for careers with livable wages, and for civic engagement.

Social studies teachers also face significant challenges; it is very difficult to meet all students’ needs when some can easily learn independently from text and others require extensive supports to understand text adequately. The data from a recent study with 11th-grade social studies classes revealed that disparities between students are often quite stark: fall reading achievement scores in a typical class spanned more than 2.5 standard deviations of reading achievement,2 which means reading achievement in many classes can span more than 70 percentile points (e.g., 9th percentile to 82nd percentile). With such a wide range of reading abilities in their classes, it was impossible for those social studies teachers to focus solely on the content and discourse of the primary and secondary text sources in their curricula. Although there is enormous variety among high school students with limited literacy, many have some foundational word-reading skills* but may struggle with text because of its vocabulary, structure, or length; they may also have difficulty making connections and inferences in the text, in part because they lack assumed background knowledge or effective strategies for monitoring their comprehension of the text while reading.

How can a teacher address the needs of students who are not proficient readers at the same time they are trying to teach a mountain of content?  Read the rest of the piece here.