Secondary Content-Area Literacy: Time for Crisis or Opportunity for Reform? Briefing Paper

The education field must go beyond calling attention to an adolescent literacy crisis and the need for additional resources--a critical need--to treating adolescent literacy as the foundation for more ambitious efforts to improve middle and high schools in their entirety (Heller & Greenleaf, 2007; Jacob, 2008). Instruction around adolescent literacy, or content-area literacy, is fundamental to building the kind of secondary schools that are necessary to support the nation's social and economic health. The challenge is to connect the teaching of literacy to the rest of the secondary education improvement agenda. This article is about a literature search that focused on studies on secondary content-area literacy that were published within the last 10 years. However, when reference lists were reviewed, staff found that some older research provided key information on the topic. Therefore, these seminal publications were included in the resources used to develop this paper.