4 Ideas For Motivating Adolescent Male Readers

contributed by Kenny McKee

It’s no secret that state and national assessments continue to indicate that male readers lag behind female readers in literacy and literacy skills.

The gap tends to grow larger as students enter adolescence. It’s also no secret that many students dislike reading — in class or at home. Just ask a high school teacher…or a teenage boy. While it’s not true that all teenage boys dislike reading, there is a growing trend of many becoming unmotivated readers.

Obviously, students who are resistant to reading are unlikely to get better at it. Here are four ideas for motivating adolescent male readers.

4 Ideas For Motivating Adolescent Male Readers

1. Focus On The Now

Oftentimes, teachers emphasize the importance of reading skills or reading content by saying, “You will need this for the test,” or “You will need this for college,” or “When you get to the real world, you’ll need to be able to do this.” Well, students are living in the real world right now and for the most part, they have real concerns about their lives that they want to solve.

Many boys (and teenagers overall) like to know how learning impacts their lives in the moment, and they are generally not concerned with how schoolwork relates to an unclear future. Focusing on the future can lead to procrastination, since, to young men, the future seems a long time away (Smith & Wilhelm, 2002). Also, teachers can lose focus on students’ needs in the present.

We can make the reading we choose for whole-class instruction more motivating by relating it to the ‘here and now.’ Survey your students to determine what they want to learn, and select reading materials aligned with their interests. Have students—male and female readers—create products, presentations, or skits from their reading materials.

Many boys will readily engage in activities that ask them to create something meaningful or to perform for their peers. Also, consider designing inquiry units where students research answers to questions that concern teens, such as “Is the senior year of high school necessary?” or “Is love really all you need?” Weaving literature and informational texts around such topics can motivate many students, especially if students have some voice in what the inquiry topics will be.

2. Use A Variety Of Text

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In some schools, there is a narrow view of what constitutes literacy. Even with the adoption of Common Core State Standards that emphasize informational text, the primary focus of secondary English language arts classes, especially in high schools, is often the study of literature. Male readers engage in many other forms of literacy that traditionally are not valued by teachers. Since many boys do not read teacher-privileged literary fiction texts at home, many of them classify themselves as non-readers, even if they do extensive reading from the Internet, magazines, and newspapers (Cavazos-Kottke, 2005).

One solution that can have tremendous positive effects on motivation is incorporating self-selected reading as part of the English language arts classroom. Conferring with students individually over self-chosen reading provides opportunities to validate and support boys’ independent reading. Once you have learned a bit more about your male students’ reading preferences, you can find texts with similar genres, themes, or topics to include in whole-class reading. You can also better select texts for a classroom library.

3. Set Them Up For Success

Many boys need to feel like they can accomplish a task in order to even attempt it. Thus, goals must be perceived as achievable in order for boys to feel competent. The most-motivating activities offer success and demonstrate evidence of growth (Cleveland, 2011).

Scaffolding and differentiation strategies can contribute to developing a sense of competence. For example, many teachers use Newsela, a site that allows the user to alter the reading complexity of recent news stories. Students can even self-select their own readlng levels based upon factors such as familiarity with the topic, their reading purpose, and their comprehension.

Another option for students is using social scaffolding techniques such as Say Something. Students can select reading partners and then take turns reading, frequently stopping to discuss their comprehension of the text. Sentence starters can be used to help students initiate those conversations.

4. Use Male Reading Role Models

Many educators believe that a ‘Boy Code’ that stems from an absence of positive male role models, the massive influence of the media’s distorted images of masculinity, and the fear of being labeled ‘feminine’ impacts reading motivation. Because girls generally develop literacy skills at an earlier age, many boys perceive reading as a feminine activity. This perception leads to some boys shunning reading. Since they do not participate in school reading, they become less proficient at it, which perpetuates their lack of motivation (Cleveland, 2011).

Role models for male readers are important for infiltrating the beliefs of the ‘Boy Code.’ Many people point to the under-representation of males in the teaching profession, especially in English classrooms, as a factor giving the ‘Boy Code’ more power. Some studies have found that bringing successful men into schools helps. Some evidence of this claim is that boys in wealthier districts generally report reading more often and have higher reading assessment scores because their fathers are likely to have jobs where literacy is valued.

These boys are more likely to view literacy as a masculine trait (Sadowski, 2010). Especially for boys living in poverty, it is important for male educators to discuss their reading and the importance of literacy in their lives. In addition, having successful and influential community members share the ways they use reading can be enlightening to young men.

Kenneth McKee is a literacy and instructional coach with Buncombe County Schools in Asheville, NC. He is a 2014 ASCD Emerging Leader. To learn more about his work, follow him on Twitter (@kennycmckee) or visit his website kennycmckee.com; 4 Ideas For Motivating Adolescent Male Readers; image attribution flickr user gammarayproduction

A Useful Reading Comprehension Tool To Simplify Text

by TeachThought Staff

Need a reading comprehension tool to simplify texts for students?

Something practical, along the lines of our “How To Google Search by Reading Level,” and Conversion Chart For Reading Level Measurement Tools? You may find some use in rewordify.

In short, you copy/paste text to be ‘simplified,’ and it does its thing. It attempts to simplify the text at the vocabulary level (as opposed to syntatical, structural, or idea level). Nonetheless, when vocabulary is the barrier, it does the trick. The replacements don’t always do what they should–simplify the text to make it more readable for struggling readers, or students reading beyond their natural level. Sometimes the definitions are themselves confusing, as they add an additional cognitive movement the student has to make, internalizing this now sterile definition back into some kind of meaning.

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In our brief use, we’ve found it useful in the right circumstance. You can’t copy/paste a chapter from a book and hand it to a child to read as a ‘modified text’ that has been ‘personalized’ for them. It’d simply make a mess of the text, and likely ruin the reading experience.

What you can do, however, is use it to simplify short excerpts for individual readers, or for a whole-class read. You can also let students use it themselves as they will, or as a model of how passages can begin to be deconstructed.

The developers explain the features of rewordify:

• Work with all your documents in one convenient place
• Edit and delete your documents
• Make any document public, so anyone can find it from the search box
• Make any document link-only, so people need a link to view it
• Make any document private, so people need a password to view it
• Save vocabulary lists
• Keep track of what words you’ve learned, are learning, and want to learn, and more!

A Reading Comprehension Tool To Simplify Text

What Is SQ3R? A Definition For Teachers

by TeachThought Staff

What is SQ3R?

Put briefly, SQ3R is a strategy for reading and studying. It is a sequence designed to increase retention and understanding by encouraging the reader to use each stage of the reading process (Before, During, and after) intentionally, moving from small details to large ideas and back again.

By setting a purpose for the reading, asking questions, taking notes, and reviewing both notes and text in relation to one another, readers are able to delve more deeply into a text compared to merely reading or even reading and responding (in a learning journal, for example). Dartmouth University helpfully captures each step by summarizing the steps of the SQ3R strategy below.

The 5 Steps Of SQ3R

• Step 1: Survey
  • Skim through the book and read topical/sub-topical headings and sentences. Read summaries at the end of chapters and books. Try to anticipate what the author is going to say. Write these notes on paper, then look it over to get an overall idea.
• Step 2: Question
  • Turn paragraph headings into questions (e.g. “Basic Concepts of Reading” to “What are the Basic Concepts of Reading?”). Write these questions out.
• Step 3: Read
  • Read with alertness to answer the questions you came up with. Write notes, in your own words, under each question.
• Step 4: Recall
  • Without looking at your books or notes, mentally visualize, in your own words, the high points of the material immediately upon completing the reading
  • ** More time should be spent on recall than reading
• Step 5: Review
  • Look at your questions, answers, notes and book to see how well you did recall. Finish up with a mental picture of the WHOLE*

Adapted from F.P. Robinson. Effective Study. New York: Harper and Bros. 1948. Chapter II

Further, The Learning Corner at Oregon State offers more detail and strategies for each stage of the SQ3R process as well as clarifying the purpose of each step. We’ve retyped the questions and text below the image in case the image is somehow inaccessible or illegible.

How To Survey

Look over the material: title, prevoew, headings, visuals, bolded words, summary

Read the summary if possible

Think about background knowledge or information

How To Question

Turn headings into questions

Ask What? Who? Why? How?

How To Read

Look for answers to your questions

Write in the margins

Underline or highlight important concepts

Break up the reading into chunks

Take breaks when needed

How To Recite

Say it out loud in your own words

Write a summary of the paragraph or section

Writing notes of notecards for information

Create a concept map or graphic organizer of the ideas and how they relate

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How To Review

Look over your notes and quiz yourself on the information

Make connections between readings and notes from class

Revisit your notes and the text weekly (or more frequently) and test yourself on new and old material each week

Why Survey?

It gives you the big picture

It helps you decide what’s important

You can connect information to what you already know

It prepares you to read

Why Question?

It helps you stay focused on the reading

It gives you a purpose (looking for the answer) and creates interest

It’s good practice for quizzing yourself on topics

Why Read?

It’s how to get information from the text

It’s good preparation for your lectures and discussions

It’s an essentiual part of the test preparation

Why Recite?

It helps you retain information after you read it

It checks for your level of understanding

It’s a way to interact with the text and stay focused

Why Review?

It helps you retain information from reading to reading and week to week

It helps you prepare for exams, papers, and related assignments

What Is SQ3R? A Definition For Teachers And Students