Confessions of an English Teacher All About the Teaching of Reading in the High School

There are numerous ways to develop literacy in the English classroom, and it all starts with the understanding that an English teacher should be a reading cheerleader. Encouraging students to read requires several preparatory steps on the part of the English teacher. The English teacher wants to set up an independent reading program in which students choose readings that are culturally and linguistically appropriate to their reading abilities. This is fundamental to literacy growth. While literature professors argue that students should read difficult literature to advance their literacy, I argue that this did not occur during 35 years of teaching high school students literature in the classroom. In fact, I thought it was a miserable failure.
English teachers do not get degrees in literacy development, nor do they earn degrees in the teaching of English. English teachers get a degree in literature, the literature their professors pontificated about when they earned that degree. However, that degree did not prepare the English teacher to teach writing, grammar, usage, or mechanics in the context of writing. In short, their preparation for teaching English was woefully inadequate for success in the high school classroom. In this book, I advocate that English teachers take the approach to improving their students' literacy by advocating and cheerleading the importance of reading. English teachers would be a lot better off learning to act like reading teachers instead of like their college professors, who emoted about the virtues of the literature they loved. That literature, for the most part, does not advance students' literacy, despite what many English teachers might think. Therefore, I suggest a different approach to advancing students' literacy in the high school setting: ensure that their readings are linguistically and culturally adapted to their audience. Although I was not successful in fully implementing this program, the part I did manage to implement showed me that this approach far exceeds the excessive, illusory literature that students are forced to read, even if they can't read it.