The Effects of the Content Literacy Continuum on Adolescent Students' Reading Comprehension and Academic Achievement
Intervention description
CLC addresses literacy across the entire curriculum by incorporating literacy activities in a consistent way in standalone reading classes and in all core content classes. CLC is not a single intervention for fostering content literacy at the secondary level, but rather a set of interventions to provide students with gradually more intensive, systematic, and explicit instruction in literacy content, strategies, and skills adapted to their needs.
The study considers three of the five levels that make up CLC:1
- Level 1: Enhanced content instruction. Teachers of core subjects develop and use routines to help students at all literacy levels master critical content, acquire vocabulary and background knowledge to improve comprehension and communication skills, and organize complex content.
- Level 2: Embedded strategy instruction. Core content teachers work with students to develop one or two learning strategies (such as paraphrasing or self-questioning) that match the demands in their course.
- Level 3: Intensive strategy instruction. Reading teachers provide more intensive instruction to students reading 2–5 years below grade level (students who need to develop comprehension strategies).
Schools that adopt CLC are assigned a site coordinator who delivers most of the professional development on content enhancement routines and learning strategies to teachers of core content areas. Site coordinators are former teachers from schools that successfully adopted and implemented CLC and who have implemented CLC in other schools. Site coordinators interview administrators and teachers to better understand the culture and structures within the school and to build relationships with staff and knowledge of school context.
Taking a coaching approach to professional development, site coordinators work with the schools' literacy leadership teams (a cross-disciplinary team of teachers or curriculum leaders) to develop priorities, plan the phased roll-out of routines and strategies, establish level 3 reading classes, and devise a professional development schedule that works best for the schools. While some schools have conducted some of the professional development as a two- or three-day summer institute, most professional development is provided each month during two or three-day visits by the site coordinators. Alone or with a partner, site coordinators work with teachers to develop strategies and routines, demonstrate the strategies and routines in teachers' classrooms, and then observe the teachers as they use the routines or strategies with their students. Site coordinators spend 18–27 days each year at each CLC school.
Coordinators also lead multiday summer training sessions with level 3 reading teachers on the reading curriculum and recommended instructional techniques that accompany the curriculum.2 The instructional practices and routines are consistent with the strategies and routines to be used by core content area teachers.
Finally, site coordinators and the schools' literacy leadership team choose teachers and staff who understand the framework and are enthusiastic about the intervention to become internal developers in schools and districts. These internal developers will help to sustain CLC once the evaluation project ends and expand it to higher grades and other schools.
1 The full version of the CLC includes two additional levels of support. Level 4 is intensive basic skills instruction that takes a team approach to reading for students having difficulty with foundational decoding, fluency, and comprehension skills. Level 5 includes therapeutic intervention by special education teachers and other support personnel for students with underlying language disorders.
2 Although CLC developed out of a separate research tradition, similarities between CLC's tiered levels of support and the response to intervention approach have prompted the Center for Research on Learning to refer to CLC as an application of response to intervention to secondary school level literacy (Deshler and Kovaleski 2007; Fuchs and Deshler 2007).