The Big M: Helping to Diagnose and Support Adolescent Readers

As adolescents move into the middle grades and high school, they often receive little instruction about how to use reading and writing strategies to learn with texts (Vacca & Vacca, 2001). This phenomenon is based on an assumption that once children learn to read and write, they will be able to do so for the rest of their lives. Adolescents will often go through the motions of reading, relying on decoding words easily and reading smoothly as they did in elementary school (Hall, 2004). The majority of adolescents may appear skillful in the mechanics of reading, but they aren't strategic enough in their ability to explore and interpret meaning.