Reading is not a technical skill acquired once and for all in the primary grades.  Rather, reading is a developmental process that continues to grow through engagement with various types of texts for many purposes over a lifetime.
Through a diverse array of literacy practices, young people make meaning and act upon their worlds.  Adolescents read in multiple ways, both in and out of school, with texts ranging from clothing logos to music lyrics, from weblogs to comic books, from Harry Potter to The Scarlet Letter.

Effective teachers recognize and value this wide variety of adolescent literacy resources.  Classroom conversations about how, why, and what we read are important parts of an effective middle and high school curriculum.  Research indicates that discussion-based approaches to academic literacy content are strongly linked to student achievement. 

Current research tells us that effective literacy programs:
• Emphasize connections between students’ daily lives, prior knowledge, and texts.
• Emphasize student conversations to make connections.
• Utilize extensive reading of a range of texts to build reading experience.
• Support readers with strategy lessons and discussions.
• Engage readers in conversations about their reading, focusing on the strategies they use and their language knowledge.
• Emphasize developing reading experience and making connections to prior knowledge rather than phonics, decoding, and basic reading skills.
Students need:
• Experiences with diverse texts in a variety of genres, offering multiple perspectives on real life experiences.
• Texts that are self-selected and of high interest to the student, including print, electronic, and visual media.
• Authentic, student-initiated and teacher-facilitated conversations about texts that lead to diverse interpretations of text.
• Experience in thinking critically about how the reader engages with text.
• Experience in critical examination of texts.