Building Adolescent Literacy in Today's English Classrooms

“Today’s English classroom should not look like the English classes of the 1940s or even the 1980s. Students now engage in dozens of literacy activities that were unavailable just a generation ago.&rdquo

Deciding what to teach in English class is more complicated—and more important—than ever. In Building Adolescent Literacy in Today’s English Classrooms, Randy Bomer summons his experiences as President of NCTE, Director of a National Writing Project site, a university professor, Co-director of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, and consultant in schools nationwide, to provide an approach to teaching English that works for today’s adolescents.

Building Adolescent Literacy in Today’s English Classrooms is built on a foundation of research into best practices and infused with the importance of young people learning to interact with others’ texts and to produce their own across many genres and media. Bomer tackles not only reading, writing, and assessment, but also crucial contemporary topics such as choice, ethnic diversity and multilingualism, attention management, technology, and struggling learners.

To help prepare students to participate in a globalized, digital world, Building Adolescent Literacy in Today’s English Classrooms provides a framework for making key instructional decisions, including how to:

• understand adolescents and their literacy needs through effective assessment
• use assessment to plan instruction that addresses whole-class and individual needs
• manage the classroom with predictable, flexible structures that support students’ interests rather than suppress them
• give students opportunities to be motivated, critical, passionate readers and writers
• help adolescents become invested in a literate life with a meaningful curriculum whose aim is to empower them to connect with the world.

“We have to help students become involved and invested in literate tasks that are significant to them,” writes Randy Bomer, “not because they were born to love reading and writing but because of the ways literate activity connects to other things in life that matter to them.” Building Adolescent Literacy in Today’s English Classrooms shows how with vignettes from diverse classrooms, examples of real-life lessons, and a passion for teaching adolescents that will inspire and support preservice teachers across their entire careers.

Randy Bomer, author of Building Adolescent Literacy in Today's English Classrooms, is a leader in secondary English/Language Arts teaching whose goals have always been to connect research to classroom practice and to make a literate life possible for every student. As a teacher of first-year college students, he helps young people develop habits of mind that prepare them for further college work. He shares his passion with individual preservice and in-service teachers as a professor at the University of Texas and as the Director of the Heart of Texas Writing Project. As a literacy consultant and former Co-director of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, he has shared his vision with large groups of teachers nationwide. He has also brought his experience to the entire field as past president of the National Council of Teachers of English, and as the author or coauthor of Time for Meaning, For a Better World, and The Handbook of Adolescent Literacy Research.