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We are not helping students acquire the strategic reading skills they wilL need to cope with the ever-increasing demands of the marketplace. Administrators, teachers, and parents need to make literacy a top priority and reading skills must be incorporated into courses across the curriculum.
In 1994, one quarter of our nation's high school seniors and nearly a third of our eighth graders failed to reach even the basic level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading assessment. Most of our students lack critical reading skills; few read regularly. Stedman and Kaestle (1991) report that an alarming portion of the population-from 15 to 30 percent-has difficulty reading common text: news articles, maps, report cards, coupons, recipes, even medicine directions. Equally disturbing is that we are becoming an increasingly aliterate society: Those who can read do not. Statistics reveal that most of the books read in the United States-some 80 percent-are read by about 10 percent of the population (Cullinan, 1987).
Furthermore, as reading researcher Jeanne Chall of Harvard University points out, as the nature of our economy changes from an industrial, manufacturing base to a technological knowledge base, our students will need an even higher proficiency in reading and writing. The CEOs of major corporations are calling for higher literacy standards to meet future demands. If students are unable to read at these higher levels, they will have difficulty finding and holding a job.
How can schools meet the challenge of improving literacy? In current practice, reading skills are generally taught at the elementary level. Once students reach the middle level, they are expected to make the leap from learning to read via the familiar topics and story format of basal readers to reading to obtain information from content areas texts that present new information organized in entirely different ways. Instruction shifts from teaching students the process of reading to focusing on the content of the text (Anthony and Raphael, 1989).
A common complaint of middle level and high school teachers is that students do not know how to read content area texts. Frustrated by their students apparent lack of critical reading skills-and not sufficiently trained in teaching content area reading strategies, themselves-many teachers resort to telling their students what they need to know...