Reading instruction does not end in elementary or middle school. Secondary students (grades 9-12) face literacy demands of unprecedented complexity — analyzing literary texts for ambiguity and craft, evaluating scientific arguments, synthesizing historical sources, navigating digital information landscapes, and preparing for college and career reading expectations. ED5554 develops the specialized knowledge needed to design secondary reading curriculum that addresses these demands while accounting for the family, community, and cultural factors that shape adolescent literacy development.
Factors that influence secondary reading instruction
Understanding the ecosystem in which adolescent literacy develops
- Family and home literacy environment: ED5554 examines how family literacy practices — the reading habits, literacy resources, language use, and educational expectations present in students' homes — influence reading development through high school. While elementary literacy research has extensively documented home literacy effects, ED5554 extends this understanding to adolescence, where family influence becomes more indirect but remains significant through educational aspirations, access to reading materials, and the value placed on academic literacy in the home
- Community and cultural factors: The course examines how community resources (public libraries, after-school programs, tutoring access, book availability), cultural attitudes toward reading and education, linguistic diversity, and socioeconomic conditions shape the literacy opportunities available to secondary students. The course develops culturally sustaining approaches to literacy instruction that build on students' home and community literacy practices rather than positioning school-based literacy as superior to or separate from the literacies students practice outside of school
- Adolescent identity and motivation: ED5554 addresses the developmental reality that adolescent reading engagement is closely tied to identity. Secondary students who do not identify as readers — often because of years of negative reading experiences or because reading is not valued in their peer culture — are unlikely to engage with reading instruction no matter how well-designed. The course develops strategies for building positive reading identities through student choice, culturally relevant texts, authentic purposes for reading, and social reading experiences
Digital literacy in secondary education
ED5554 addresses the digital literacy competencies that secondary students need for academic success and informed citizenship. The course covers the reading skills specific to digital environments: evaluating the credibility and reliability of online sources (lateral reading strategies, source analysis, fact-checking techniques), navigating hyperlinked and multimodal texts that require readers to make choices about reading paths, synthesizing information across multiple digital sources with different perspectives and levels of reliability, and reading critically in environments designed to manipulate attention and engagement (social media, clickbait, algorithmic content curation). The course also addresses how digital reading differs from print reading — research suggests that comprehension and retention may be lower for digital texts, particularly long-form informational texts, and that students often overestimate their digital reading comprehension — and develops strategies for helping students become more effective and critical digital readers.
Narrative and informational text instruction
ED5554 develops instructional strategies for both narrative and informational texts at the secondary level. For narrative text, the course covers close reading of literary fiction (analyzing author's craft, theme, symbolism, narrative structure, point of view, and the use of literary devices), strategies for engaging reluctant readers with fiction (text selection, book talks, literature circles, reader response approaches), and the use of young adult literature as a bridge to canonical texts. For informational text, the course covers the text structures that students encounter across content areas (description, sequence, cause-effect, compare-contrast, problem-solution, argument-evidence), strategies for reading discipline-specific texts (scientific articles, primary source documents, mathematical proofs, technical manuals), and the vocabulary demands of academic and domain-specific language at the secondary level. The course addresses the Common Core State Standards' emphasis on increased informational text reading at the secondary level, and develops the curriculum design skills to ensure that students have adequate experience with both literary and informational texts across their high school program.
Developing secondary reading curriculum
ED5554 develops the curriculum design skills needed to create comprehensive reading programs for secondary settings. The course covers the unique challenges of secondary reading instruction: content-area teachers who view themselves as subject specialists rather than reading teachers, the absence of dedicated reading instruction time in many secondary schedules, the wide range of reading abilities in secondary classrooms, and the need to prepare students simultaneously for standardized testing and authentic reading tasks. The course develops strategies for integrating reading instruction across the content areas (disciplinary literacy approaches), creating reading intervention programs for striving secondary readers, building school-wide reading cultures through sustained silent reading programs and book clubs, and designing reading curriculum that prepares students for the literacy demands of college and career — including the ability to read complex texts independently, write from sources, and engage in evidence-based argumentation.
ED5554 assignments include curriculum designs, digital literacy projects, community literacy analyses, and secondary reading intervention plans
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Curriculum designs, digital literacy projects, community literacy analyses, secondary reading intervention plans.
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Frequently asked questions
The emphasis on family and community factors in ED5554 reflects a research-based understanding that adolescent literacy development is not determined solely by what happens in the classroom. Research consistently shows that out-of-school literacy practices — including the volume and variety of independent reading, the literacy resources available in the home, the conversations about reading that happen in families, and the community resources that support or constrain reading opportunities — significantly influence secondary students' reading development. A student who reads widely outside of school develops vocabulary, background knowledge, and reading stamina that no classroom instruction alone can replicate. Conversely, a student whose out-of-school environment provides few reading materials, limited adult modeling of reading, and no quiet space for reading faces disadvantages that even excellent classroom instruction cannot fully overcome. ED5554 develops the skills to work with these factors rather than ignoring them: building family literacy awareness through parent engagement strategies, connecting students with community literacy resources (libraries, community organizations, mentoring programs), understanding and building on the literacies students practice in their communities (including digital literacies, multilingual practices, and oral storytelling traditions), and designing reading programs that extend the school's literacy influence into students' lives beyond the school day. This ecological approach to literacy instruction recognizes that sustainable improvements in adolescent reading require coordination between school, family, and community — no single institution can do it alone.