Throughout the United States, concern is growing among educators about the numbers of students in secondary schools who do not read well. In response, committed and well-meaning educators are increasingly advocating remedial reading courses for struggling adolescent readers. In this article, Cynthia Greenleaf, Ruth Schoenbach, Christine Cziko, and Faye Mueller offer an alternative vision to remedial reading instruction. The authors describe an instructional framework — Reading Apprenticeship — that is based on a socially and cognitively complex conception of literacy, and examine an Academic Literacy course based on this framework. Through case studies of student reading and analyses of student survey and test score data, they demonstrate that academically underperforming students became more strategic, confident, and knowledgeable readers in the Academic Literacy course. Students in Academic Literacy gained on average what is normally two years of reading growth within one academic year on a standardized test of reading comprehension. Student reflections, interviews, and pre-post surveys from Academic Literacy revealed students' new conceptions of reading for understanding, their growing interest in reading books and favorite authors, their increasing repertoires of strategies for approaching academic reading, and their emerging confidence in themselves as readers and thinkers. They argue for investing resources and effort into demystifying academic reading for their students through ongoing, collaborative inquiry into reading and texts, while providing students with protected time for reading and access to a variety of attractive texts linked to their curriculum. This approach can move students beyond the "literacy ceiling" to increased understanding, motivation, opportunity, and agency as readers and learners. These findings challenge the current policy push for remedial reading programs for poor readers, and invite further research into what factors create successful reading instruction programs for secondary school students.

ESPITE THE increasing pressures for content coverage in the current high-stakes testing environment, a small but growing number of middle and high school teachers across the country are taking the time to teach about reading in their disciplines. They are learning to recognize their own complex disciplinespecific reading processes and are helping their students do the same, implementing an approach we call Reading Apprenticeship.® These teachers' efforts have made a significant difference in attitudes and outcomes for many of their students, particularly for those who are reading well below grade level and who have "given up on reading." 1 CREATING COMMUNITIES OF INQUIRY AMONG TEACHERS AND STUDENTS Since 1995, we and our colleagues in the Strategic Literacy Initiative at WestEd have worked with several Apprenticing Adolescents To Reading in Subject-Area Classrooms When middle and high school teachers reconceptualize students' classroom experience as a "cognitive apprenticeship," they begin to see the power of modeling their own strategies for reading and making sense of challenging texts in their disciplines.

Two-thirds of U.S. high school students today are unable to read and comprehend complex academic materials, think critically about texts, synthesize information from multiple sources, or effectively communicate what they have learned. And in response, many teachers simply stop assigning challenging texts, opting instead to “deliver content” through lectures. For 25 years, though, the Reading Apprenticeship program has shown that when school and district leaders embrace a collective responsibility to provide effective reading and writing instruction, they can help subject-area teachers reflect on their own literacy practices and fundamentally rethink their approach to literacy instruction.

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