My Top Five Reading Strategies for Secondary Students

Ten years into my career, I was recruited from fourth-grade Read 180 to eighth-grade Read 180 on a middle school campus. I was a reluctant applicant. In the secondary grades, English language arts shifted from comprehension to more analysis. Therefore, I believed teaching teenagers was out of my wheelhouse. Nevertheless, my instructional coach at the time pointed out that secondary students needed teachers with strong elementary backgrounds and insisted the transition would be a smooth one. In the ten years I’ve spent teaching secondary students, I learned that many require reading instruction, much like elementary students—but with a mature twist. Instruction should include how to grapple with content on various media platforms as well as attending to novels on paperback. With that in mind, here are my top five reading strategies for secondary students.

Strategy 1: Stamina-building

One way to empower less experienced readers in secondary ELA is to point out how much they can read. Our tech-savvy teens create insecurity for themselves by scrolling and scanning rather than reading digital texts in their entirety. To encourage attention to texts, we spend a few minutes a day measuring how much we can read.

On the first day, I instruct students to read novels of their choice. If students claim not to have reading interests, I ask them to list their favorite movies and online video channels to match them to a text genre. I offer the students a stack and ask them to read the blurbs before settling on one or two.

Before we start reading, I provide some tips for remaining focused. However, I don’t let them know how long we’ll read. I set a timer, and when it sounds, I ask students to count their pages. Next, we discuss the distractions they experienced. Over several days, we build from five to twenty minutes of reading time. Once students reach increments of ten and twenty pages read in any given amount of time, they get to sign my autograph wall in celebration.

Strategy 2: #theme

Theme seems like such a simple concept, but secondary students need a strategy that helps them recognize authors’ messages about life in the literature they read. Students sometimes confuse theme with summary, or they simply overlook how events build up to present themes. To demystify the concept of theme, I combine it with something they’re already familiar with: hashtags. Hashtags help students create themes in the way content creators express their ideas on social media, giving them a foundation for analyzing what they read. With the hashtag strategy, students read portions of the text and jot down a one-word hashtag to summarize the events in that section. For a two-page text, we may jot down four to six hashtags. Once we collect all our hashtags, we create a longer hashtag that communicates the author’s message or the lesson that the characters learned.

Strategy 3: Scanning

This strategy from Unlocking Multilingual Learners’ Potential helps multilingual learners build vocabulary before they read. With scanning, you ask students to start at the end of the text and scan towards the beginning for words they don’t know or may need help pronouncing. Give students only one to two minutes to scan and jot this list. Next, ask each student to read their list while you jot the words on your board or in a notebook. As you do, define, pronounce, and repeat the words in groups. Be sure to point out which words showed up on multiple students’ lists. Scanning requires the students to work backward so they don’t attempt to make meaning, which may add to the frustration. As an added challenge, prompt students to use the new words in context through the unit of study.

Strategy 4: Hybrid annotation

If your school or state requires online assessments like mine, much of the instruction and the assignments students complete are done through learning platforms and web-based tools like HMH Into Literature. But while our students are quite tech-savvy, they don’t always know how to transfer online text annotations to paper. There’s also debate on whether they should. To help students understand what to capture from the text they read online, I help them create personalized, genre-based annotation pages.

Let me explain: as one example, in eighth grade, students are expected to analyze poetry for point of view, graphical elements, tone, mood, themes, and extended metaphor. It’s also helpful if they can summarize a text, as this supports their ability to analyze for the other elements. So, when students read a poem online, we create an annotation sheet that contains the elements they must analyze. This becomes a classroom ritual where I pass each student a piece of lined filler paper, and they jot down those elements in a space on the page before they even read. Some students fold the paper so the creases serve as boundaries for the poetry elements. Below is a worksheet that skips these steps and has the poetry elements already in place.

Then, students read the poem and summarize it on the sheet. Next, they write their analysis in the spaces. Doing so gives them a visual to justify whether they understood what they read. It also supports their ability to answer multiple-choice questions later. As the year progressed, I noticed students began making their own versions of the hybrid annotation sheets, which shows me they are now taking ownership of their learning.

Strategy 5: Six circles

Six circles is a take on the “chunking” strategy—a technique that provides students with a visual guide while reading literary text. In general, fiction texts have a few components: an exposition where you learn the characters and setting, followed by a conflict, rising action, climax, resolution, and theme. What I point out to secondary-grade readers is that no matter the length, texts will, in general, have the same components. To make this point and to help them hone their analysis skills, I often ask my reading small groups to draw six large circles around each section of the text to estimate where the exposition, conflict, etc., will take place. These circles serve as a foundation for analyzing the six literary elements. It’s not an exact science, but students are genuinely amazed that they will read exactly what should be contained in the first circle, the exposition, followed by what should go in the next circle, the conflict, and so on.

Using this strategy, students have recognized their ability to keep track of the elements and know that if they reach the last two circles and don’t recognize the climax or resolution, they should back up and reread previous circles. Using less formal strategies like this one really put the students at ease.

When it comes to the secondary reading classroom and the variety of student needs, it’s good to have an arsenal of tried-and-true strategies like these. The more strategies you introduce, the more likely your students will eventually drive their own learning.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of HMH.

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For students in Grades 6–12, HMH Into Literature creates critical readers using culturally relevant texts that relate to students’ lives.