Tara B. Johnston, PhD is an assistant professor of education at York College of Pennsylvania. She is a former elementary school teacher, reading interventionist, and literacy specialist. Her research interests include content literacy practices, teacher knowledge and beliefs in relation to literacy, and pre-service teacher training in literacy instruction.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, most recently given to students in 2022, demonstrates that over a third of our students are not reading at even a basic level of proficiency. As a teacher and reading interventionist, I have often witnessed students across primary and secondary grades struggle to make sense of complex texts. This struggle is especially noticeable when students are asked to read challenging texts independently as they reach middle and high school. We know that many students struggle to read complex texts on their own and to demonstrate understanding of what they have read; what can we do to support them?

Effective readers reread and annotate to develop proficient reading and writing skills across content areas (Griffin et al., 2008; Xue et al., 2020). These strategies are helpful for all writers but can be particularly helpful for high school students who experience difficulties with writing (Griffin et al., 2008). Through annotation and note-taking, students can more easily remember the most important information they need when they move on to summarization or analytic writing. These skills and strategies are worth spending explicit instructional time on because they can be transferred across all content areas.

There are many developmentally appropriate instructional routines and interventions available that are designed based on results from decades of intervention research with secondary students (see Shelton, Lemons et al., 2021 and Brown & Pyle, 2021). My favorite is School-Wide Promoting Adolescents’ Comprehension of Text (SW-PACT), an instructional routine designed to improve the quality of reading and writing instruction for secondary students, incorporating both rereading and annotation to support summarization skills, main idea identification, and later writing abilities (Shelton, Wexler et al., 2021). SW-PACT is content area–agnostic and easy to adapt based on the needs of the students and the resources available to the teacher.

Here’s an example of an assignment where SW-PACT can change the way students approach reading strategies. Students in a ninth grade social studies classroom are required to read a text about immigration to the United States from different countries during the mid- to late 1900s. Students are asked to read a set of multiple texts on this topic where each text focuses on a different group of immigrants from around the world and the causes that led them to come to the United States. The teacher asks students to compare and contrast the migration patterns of each group of people as well as the causes and effects of those migration patterns. This type of writing prompt requires that students are able to synthesize and evaluate the information learned from the texts.

Students who already struggle with reading comprehension may have difficulties in applying these skills to a set of complex texts independently.

Using SW_PACT’s “Get the Gist” strategy, teachers and students will:

• Read, and then reread as necessary, a text one section at a time.
• Identify the most important subject in a section and the most important information about that subject.
• Annotate two key parts of the section for later.
• Write a main idea statement for each section.
• At the end of the reading exercise, the students are finally able to write a summary statement of the entire text using the main idea statements they wrote for each section.

Students who aren’t able to read the text fluently benefit from annotation. The annotations will lighten the cognitive load for students and help them to remember this information when they need to answer text-dependent questioning that may be relevant to informational, expository, or narrative writing prompts. Teachers should model how to annotate each section of text for students on a smart board or projector so students understand how to annotate with a purpose.

How can you get started with your students? Set aside time to read each text, one section at a time. In the first section of the text, the teacher models how to figure out the important subject as well as what is the most important information about that subject. Then, she models how to write a “gist” statement (main idea statement) for that section. This process is repeated for the remaining sections. The teacher also models how to refer back to and reread the text when a reader can’t quite figure out which information is the most important. She thinks aloud this process for students to get a glimpse into her thought process. Students work with a partner to write gist statements for the remaining sections, helping each other to reread each section when they get stuck or cannot remember the most important information. The teacher encourages them to reread each section to find subjects that are frequently repeated and to underline or annotate those words. By the end of the process, students have a set of annotated texts along with summaries for each text that can be used for writing assignments in the remainder of the unit.

Last year, I helped to train a large number of teachers in a school district on the SW-PACT practices. One teacher who works primarily with emergent multilingual students was thrilled because she saw more growth in her students’ reading and writing after implementing one SW-PACT lesson a week for about 12 weeks than she had in her many years of teaching. She now encourages and supports other teachers throughout her district to implement the practices.

Teachers in this district spent many weeks planning and rolling out the SW-PACT practices. Instructors in each content area modeled the practices for students first using a grade-level text. They modeled the gist and rereading strategies for the entire class first, then used guided practice to check that students understood the process. Teachers should not move on to independent practice or partner work until most of the class can write a summary statement on their own with minimal support from the teacher. Students who need additional support can work in a small group with the teacher while other students work in pairs. It took teachers approximately six weeks to introduce the practices and for students to grasp the process. Now, students are working consistently with a partner to independently read and reread texts across all their courses and are more easily able to summarize what they have read. 

Rereading is a metacognitive strategy used to improve reading comprehension and meaning construction and proven to be effective for secondary readers with reading disabilities and difficulties (Margolin & Snyder, 2018). Therefore, SW-PACT is an excellent example of how to incorporate both rereading and annotation into content area literacy instruction. I hope you will give it a try.

For more information and resources, please visit https://aimcoaching.org/resources/adolescent-literacy

References

Brown, S. A., & Pyle, N. (2021). Self-questioning strategy routine to enhance reading comprehension among secondary students. TEACHING Exceptional Children, 53(6), 441-449. https://doi.org/10.1177/0040059920976677

Griffin, T. D., Wiley, J., & Thiede, K. W. (2008). Individual differences, rereading, and self-explanation: Concurrent processing and cue validity as constraints on metacomprehension accuracy. Memory & Cognition, 36, 93-103. https://doi.org/10.3758/MC.36.1.93

Margolin, S. J., & Snyder, N. (2018). It may not be that difficult the second time around: The effects of rereading on the comprehension and metacomprehension of negated text. Journal of Research in Reading, 41(2), 392-402. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9817.12114

Shelton, A., Lemons, C. J., & Wexler, J. (2021). Supporting main idea identification and text summarization in middle school co-taught classes. Intervention in School and Clinic, 56(4), 217-223. https://doi.org/10.1177/1053451220944380

Shelton, A., Wexler, J., Kurz, L. A., & Swanson, E. (2021). Incorporating evidence-based literacy practices into middle school content areas. TEACHING Exceptional Children, 53(4), 270-278. https://doi.org/10.1177/0040059920968582

Xue, S., Jacobs, A. M., & Lüdtke, J. (2020). What is the difference? Rereading Shakespeare’s sonnets—An eye tracking study. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, Article 421. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00421