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Reading Apprenticeship is an approach to adolescent reading improvement that builds on the expertise of teachers as experienced content area readers and brings to the surface the abundant resources adolescents can access from their own background and the multiple literacies that are part of their world in and out of school. The dimensions of classroom life supporting Reading Apprenticeship are examined.

It's October and the seventh- and eighth-grade students in Rita Jensen's English language development class are reading "Old Man" by Ricardo Sanchez, a poem about memory, heritage, family, elders. First students scan the poem, taking the long view "like you're looking at it from an airplane overhead" and talking to the text, noting first impressions, questions, and any roadblocks to comprehension. After reading the poem silently and making more notes, they work in small groups to surface questions, share images and impressions, and collaborate on a summary capturing their preliminary understanding of key ideas in the poem. Finally, they bring their ideas and questions back to the whole class to develop a deeper understanding of the poem with Rita's facilitation. Later they'll be writing poems themselves, which will be included in a multicultural Millennium Calendar, to be produced using computer technology and marketed in the community.

Students have their reader's tool kit ready-physical tools in the form of a favorite writing implement, highlighters, a copy of the poem to mark up, and their reading log; and mental tools such as questioning, predicting, summarizing, making connections, and re-reading. They began building this tool kit from the first day in Rita's class, and evidence of their efforts is posted all over the classroom on brainstorming lists and posters, like the Good Readers Tool Kit list that they'll add to throughout the year. But their most essential resource is the community of learners who have been building a trusting relationship since September, with Rita as their coach and mentor. This is a Reading Apprenticeship classroom, an environment where Rita and her students are engaged in a shared inquiry into reading, language, and literacy-what literacy is; what good readers do in content areas like English, science, mathematics, and social studies; and what inexperienced readers can do to get better at their craft.

Reading Apprenticeship

Reading Apprenticeship is an approach to adolescent reading improvement that builds on the expertise of teachers as experienced content area readers. Teachers use this expertise to apprentice students into the strategies and moves skilled readers use. Reading Apprenticeship also recognizes and brings to the surface the abundant resources adolescents can access from their own background and the multiple literacies that are part of their world in and out of school.

In Rita's classroom, as in the majority of classrooms in the San Francisco Bay Area, these resources include rich linguistic and cultural diversity. Her students come from Mexico, Colombia, the Philippines, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Bosnia, Fiji. Their multiple languages, cultures, and perspectives contribute to a dynamic classroom environment where both teacher and students feel free to give voice to their own complex literacy histories and to talk about their literacy development and the challenges they face as readers (Bean, 1998, p. 153). They work together to understand the demands of reading tasks and texts, to identify areas of confusion where meaning breaks down, and to practice a repertoire of strategies that readers can learn to use flexibly and independently.

This Reading Apprenticeship approach, described in Reading for Understanding: A Guide to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms (Schoenbach et al., 1999), grew out of an inquiry into reading pursued by a group of middle and high school teachers and researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Teachers were looking for ways to help adolescent readers break through the "literacy ceiling" that was holding them back from the independent reading of challenging content area text. Participating teachers made a commitment to a case inquiry process. They looked closely at their own reading process and viewed videotapes of students reading in order to identify the resources and strategies that would help them become more effective readers. After these inquiry sessions, teachers tried out new approaches in their classrooms and came back together to share and reflect on their practice. Rita Jensen was part of this teacher inquiry community.

The idea of Reading Apprenticeship is grounded in the work of L. S. Vygotsky and his notion that children's cognitive development is "socially mediated." According to Vygotsky, children learn by participating in activities with the help of those who are more expert and can provide strategic support for parts of the task that children cannot yet do by themselves. Teachers can apprentice students by modeling, mentoring, and providing scaffolded support for intellectually challenging tasks. Jeffrey Wilhelm says "Vygotsky's writings have convinced me that everything that is learned must be taught" (2000, p. 60). Teachers' experiences in Reading Apprenticeship classrooms confirm that effective reading strategies can and should be taught, but also that everyone in the class is a teacher as well as a learner. Support for reading improvement comes through the teacher's explicit modeling and mentoring as well as abundant opportunities for guided and increasingly independent practice in a collaborative environment, fueled by the intellectual energy that comes from shared inquiry.

The Dimensions of Classroom Life Supporting Reading Apprenticeship

Reading Apprenticeship is not a neat package of carefully sequenced strategies. Instead, it is an approach based on collaboration, student agency, and attention to both the resources students bring and those they need to develop to become more competent readers. In Reading Apprenticeship classrooms, how we read and why we read in the ways we do become part of the curriculum accompanying a focus on what we read. Drawing on students' strengths and helping them develop the knowledge, strategies, motivation, and confidence to become more powerful readers involves teachers in addressing four key dimensions of classroom life that nurture this reading inquiry (see Figure 1). A single poetry lesson in Rita's class illustrates how these dynamic, interactive dimensions can be orchestrated to support students' exploration of their meaning-making process in a Reading Apprenticeship environment.

Building Community: The Social Dimension

Many teachers and researchers have written about the importance of creating communities of readers and learners. The social dimension of the Reading Apprenticeship classroom gives students access to each other's reading processes and resources in a safe environment where they can also acknowledge their confusions and difficulties with texts. It includes discussion and analysis of the relationship between literacy and different types of power in society, a topic of particular relevance to students in Rita's English language development class. From the beginning of the school year, students get to know each other and explore their commonalties, especially as they relate to literacy. Students bring in texts from their own literacy lives to share with the class. Students are responsible for contributing examples of reading material they can read expertly. They bring in video manuals, magazines with ads for video games, car and wrestling magazines, materials from the Internet, the lyrics of hip hop songs. Rita makes copies for the class, and each student reads the text aloud and explains its specialized vocabulary. This assignment is one early but important step in building a community where students know one another's interests and strengths, share their reading processes, and present themselves as competent readers in their own right.

Another key to the Social Dimension in Rita's classroom is the value placed on collaboration. The class develops rules and norms that support mutual respect and collaboration, and the results of their work together are seen as vital to everyone's learning. In this student-centered environment, Rita is both a facilitator and a mentor. Sometimes she's center stage, modeling a strategy, giving explicit directions, or orchestrating a whole-class discussion, but just as often she's circulating and offering informal coaching to groups as they grapple with difficult text. Students learn how to use one another as resources, pooling their knowledge and negotiating shared understandings. They also learn the language of respectful disagreement. Alejandro says, "I agree with Harris . . ." when elaborating a point he just made, but Cindy also feels free to say, "I think the opposite of Ricardo," offering an alternative interpretation of a challenging concept. In this classroom culture, students learn they can express their confusion, ask for help from their peers, and offer divergent opinions and interpretations.

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Connecting to Reading: The Personal Dimension

The personal dimension of a Reading Apprenticeship classroom focuses on developing and extending students' individual identities and self-awareness as readers. Students explore their reading interests, their purpose for reading, and their goals for reading improvement. They have opportunities to choose what they read, to think about their preferences, and to assess how well the strategies they use are working. One of Rita's primary goals is to help students see themselves as readers. In addition to inviting them to bring in texts to share, she starts the year by building in plenty of opportunities for success with a variety of texts-both functional and academic-that are high-interest and accessible. She's looking for connection, creating opportunities for students to think "Oh, I can read this, this is something I'm motivated to get through." Once this connection is established, the level of challenge increases, but so does the level of support.

Another of Rita's goals is to help her students take responsibility and ownership for their own reading and ideas. Students are encouraged to share their likes and dislikes while understanding that they need to keep reading. After his first reading of "Old Man," Jerry volunteers, "I don't like it, it's too long." But, when questioned by another group member, he goes on to identify some of the details in the poem that develop a vivid picture of the old man.

Through her coaching, Rita acknowledges students as individuals who read at different rates and in different ways. When they are reading silently in preparation for working in small groups, she notices that some students have finished and urges them to go back and re-read, to make some predictions and connections, and to see what additional ideas the text brings up. Students also learn to value the different kinds of background knowledge individuals bring to the reading experience. Someone in the class makes a connection with the word Albuquerque because he has relatives there. Someone else recognizes that indio and pueblos are Spanish words. Yet another student draws on his personal knowledge of the immigrant experience to probe the identity of the poem's subject: "When I saw the old man, I said this guy has probably gone through a lot of stuff. I think Mexican people go through a lot of stuff to come to the United States or any other place. He probably had to suffer a lot to cross over." All these individual resources make the collective meaning grow.

Developing a Tool Kit: The Cognitive Dimension

Most traditional content area reading instruction focuses on the Cognitive Dimension. Cognition refers to the mental processes skilled readers use, including their repertoire of specific comprehension and problem-solving strategies such as rereading, questioning, paraphrasing, and summarizing. Beginning in the 1970s, researchers identified a range of strategies good readers use and suggested the idea of a cognitive apprenticeship through which students who do not use these strategies naturally can learn to use them by exposure to explicit instruction and opportunities to practice. In the Reading Apprenticeship classroom, students pay attention not only to what effective reading strategies are, but to why and when readers need to use them. Rita's students work throughout the year to refine their tools for reading, which include cognitive resources they can draw on to make meaning from a wide range of texts and to use when comprehension breaks down. Learning and Practicing strategies are not isolated from, but rather embedded in, authentic content area reading experiences, and are supported by an ongoing metacognitive conversation-lots of talk about when and why these strategies are effective.

Rather than teaching a long list of strategies that students only practice occasionally, Rita emphasizes a few high-leverage routines that students use again and again until they reach for them automatically, without prompting. She is explicit with students about the importance of both repetition and routines to internalizing the moves that skilled readers use. She wants students to see themselves as experts who have the tools and resources to do whatever they want and need to do when reading. One of the problems with skills-based reading instruction, especially when it is done out of the context of real reading, is that students are unable to independently transfer the skills they're learning to meaningful reading situations. Students need opportunities both to learn strategies and to practice using them flexibly, as needed.

In Rita's class, the most essential resources in students' cognitive tool kit are the four strategies associated with Reciprocal Teaching: questioning, clarifying, summarizing and predicting (Palincsar & Brown, 1983), to which Rita has added a fifth component-connecting. From the beginning of the year, students work with these strategies, learning to name them and practicing them explicitly when they read. This strategy work is organized around reading logs-inexpensive paperbound composition books in which students write regularly about what they're reading. Students are free to write as much as they want in their logs, which may range from a few sentences to several paragraphs. The goal is to develop the habit of using these strategies to explore the language, structure, and content of texts as well as to notice how they solve comprehension problems. Students then bring the ideas from their reading logs into their small-group and whole-class discussions for further probing and refinement. This exploration is the foundation for much of the more formal writing students do throughout the year.

Again and again the language and the thinking processes associated with these strategies are reinforced. In the case of their reading of "Old Man," Rita prompts students to use these strategies in their initial scanning of the poem. They make predictions based on the title and subtitle ("I think it's a Mexican name") and make connections with their own experience ("I have brown skin, too." "My name is also Ricardo." "This remind me of my grandpa."). When they go back to read the poem, they look for roadblocks to comprehension and are encouraged to be metacognitive about the strategies they need to use to solve these comprehension problems. The groups work to share their questions and develop a summary of key ideas, building individual and shared meaning: "At first when it said `old man with brown skin,' I thought it was African American, but then I kept reading and it was Mexican." "This is like an autobiography of an old guy that was Indian." "How do you know it's an autobiography?"

In the first few months of the year, Rita actively reinforces and facilitates students' use of questioning, clarifying, summarizing, predicting, and connecting, offering lots of procedural scaffolding (Echevarria, Vogt, & Short, 2000, p. 83), encouragement, and guidance. She circulates during small-group discussions, observing, asking questions, coaching. After collaborating in their groups, students bring their ideas and questions back to the whole class. In the case of their discussion of "Old Man," the class works on a close reading of key words and lines with Rita's helpunpacking the meaning of words and ideas they've identified as roadblocks to their understanding. At one point, they puzzle over the word "mindsoul," offering several interpretations of this abstract concept, disagreeing, and going back to the text. Rita asks, "Is there anything in the text that would make you think that? Look to the line ahead of it. Look to the line behind it." At the end of the discussion, they haven't come up with a single "right" reading but have moved closer to an interpretation grounded in evidence. There's a feeling in the classroom of many minds focused on an interesting problem. Rita sums up by saying, "You did a good job of unlocking a lot of difficult stuff in this poem." For homework, students write in their reading logs about what they are now thinking about the poem as a result of the work they've done so far. Rita asks them to write a brief summary of the key ideas, capture any lingering questions, and make some notes about what in their lives is similar to something in the poem. This personal connection will prepare them to write a poem of their own.

Throughout the year, students will further refine their work on these strategies, particularly questioning-learning about different types of questions and exploring question-answer relationships (Raphael, 1986). They will have lots of opportunities to ask questions for which there are no easy answers and to use complex questions to drive increasingly critical and intensive reading. Using a Reciprocal Reading Log, a two-page notetaking framework (see Figure 2), they'll practice questioning, clarifying, summarizing, predicting, and connecting to make sense of book-length texts. With the notes from their Reciprocal Reading Logs as a resource, they'll participate in Reciprocal Teaching, drawing on both their cognitive and collaborative tools to build shared understandings of text through reading and discussion.

Tapping Resources: The Knowledge-Building Dimension

To deepen their understanding of text, readers draw on and build several interconnecting areas of knowledge: background knowledge about the topic and content that comes from their own lived experiences and reading; knowledge of text structure, genre, and language; and knowledge about the discipline (literature, history, science, mathematics) in which the text is situated. In Rita's classroom, students investigate and further develop these richly interactive networks of knowledge as they read a wide variety of texts.

Rita begins the year by giving students plenty of opportunities to activate their prior knowledge, bringing both home and youth culture into their reading. This is especially important for students who are still building their oral and written English proficiency and bridging from their home culture and language to the academic English of school. Many students associate reading in school with the frustration of trying to read textbooks. Their response is "I don't care" and "This is boring," which, translated, often means, "I don't think I can do this." So students start by brainstorming about all the different kinds of reading they do in their everyday lives-logos on T-shirts, advertisements in magazines, billboards, text on cereal boxes, cartoons, instructions. In the first few months of class, Rita also chooses many short pieces from a variety of genres: accessible poetry and fiction, expository essays on high-interest topics, newspaper articles, columns from popular teen magazines, chapters from textbooks. Students identify different kinds of text, analyze text structures, and talk about different ways of reading depending on their purpose. They learn to preview a text, looking for headings, signal words, illustrations, and guiding questions, and to think about why these features might be present in a social studies text but not in a poem or short story. They consider not only how texts are structured, but how those structures can help them make meaning as they read.

Initially, Rita chooses texts with students' background knowledge and interests in mind. For example, in selecting the poem "Old Man," she was thinking of the importance of family and the role of grandparents in many of her students' lives as well as the complex topics of homeland and traditions for students whose families have immigrated to this country. She was aiming both for connection and challenge with a piece of literature that would offer students some obvious points of entry as well as some interpretive difficulties. As students discuss the poem, she actively coaches them to use their individual background knowledge to contribute to the group's understanding. Someone in the class recognizes the place names in the poem, someone else makes historical connections, many students find a point of identification with the brown skin of the poem's subject, with the Latino author, and with images of elders and grandfathers.

One of the biggest challenges for English language learners is developing their knowledge of language-individual words with their nuances and forms, and the idioms and syntax of the English language. Paying attention to students' levels of language development and anticipating where meaning may break down, Rita provides verbal scaffolding that will give students opportunities to hear, use, and learn new aspects of colloquial, academic, and literary English. They are encouraged to become word detectives, looking for new and interesting words to make note of in the backs of their writing notebooks as they read.

When students come back together from their work in small groups to share their ideas and the roadblocks to their understanding of "Old Man," one group brings the phrase "amidst familial gatherings" to the attention of the class. They understand the meaning of "gathering," but "amidst" and "familial" are a puzzle. Students have already practiced the routine of looking at word families, roots, prefixes and suffixes, and paying attention both to the structure and meanings they signal. Searching for words that sound like "familial," the class comes up with "familiar" and "family." After struggling with "amidst," someone consults the dictionary and explains that it means "in the middle of." Together they dismantle the roadblock, and the meaning of the line emerges, and with it a picture of the old man, the grandfather in the poem, surrounded by family, telling his stories. Rita reminds them of the social nature of their process: "See how you worked that out? You asked your partners, went to the dictionary, then worked it out with the whole class."

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Making the Invisible Visible: The Metacognitive Conversation

At the heart of the Reading Apprenticeship classroom is metacognition, the process of thinking about thinking. Metacognition is the key to surfacing the complex, largely invisible mental moves associated with reading. Fortunately, metacognition comes quite naturally to adolescents, who are fascinated by their own inner workings and thoughts. Their growing willingness to think about their own thinking and about how they know things is a great resource in the Reading Apprenticeship classroom. When students learn to be metacognitve about the mental processes they are going through as they read, they begin to see when and where their concentration lapses and their comprehension breaks down. From there, they learn to be strategic about using cognitive tools, becoming active agents of their own learning. Although Rita chooses not to use the term metacognition with her students, "metatalk" about reading is woven into every lesson. She often thinks aloud in class about her own reading process and continually coaches students, encouraging them to "Notice what's going on in your head," and asking, "How are you going to use your tools to make sense of this?" "How did you know that?" "What did you do?" "What are your choices when you get in trouble with your reading and don't understand something?" Inside the front cover of their reading logs, students glue a list of metacognitive sentence starters, which scaffold the metacognitive process by giving them a starting place for surfacing what's going on in their heads (see Figure 3).

Talking to the text (Davey, 1983) is an important tool that students in Rita's class use to stimulate both cognition and metacognition. A written version of think-aloud, talking to the text gets students into the habit of interacting with the text and surfacing and recording what is going on in their heads as they read. To build this habit, on the first day of class Rita gives students a photocopied piece of writing with plenty of white space around it for taking notes, and asks them to write down their impressions, to capture on paper what they're thinking about as they read. Thinking about their thinking and reading is something new for most students, and they're frustrated and a little suspicious at first, unsure of what this teacher is up to. They write things like "This is boring" and "Why is Ms. Jensen asking me to do this?" Talking to the text slows down and focuses the reading process, and gradually students begin to get more specific, noticing where they're getting off track and what's distracting them as well as making notes about what they're understanding. An analysis of samples of students talking to the text of "Old Man" yields marginal notes such as "What? I don't get it," "Confusing," "Why?" or "I heard of it before but I don't know what it means," along with evidence of how students are using questioning, predicting, and connecting to make sense of the poem. As Rita points out, "Just figuring out what part you didn't understand is a huge move forward." This is the point at which the purposeful use of strategies comes into play. When students know where they're getting confused and have some tools for restoring comprehension, they are better equipped to confidently face the challenges of content area reading. They're more likely to have the stamina, and perhaps the bravado, to keep reading.

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On the second day of their discussion of "Old Man," students come to class with more insights and questions they have harvested from the work they did in their discussion groups and reading logs. This time around, Rita asks them to reflect on their process, to identify the tools that were most useful in opening up the poem. Cindy touches on the line "some of our blood was here." She says, "We didn't get it, but then we talked about it and thought the ancestors from the past were born and had died." Rita probes a little; where did they learn about ancestors, about the people who went before? In history, Cindy answers.

Students look back at their Good Readers Tool Kit list and enumerate what they did when they got stuck: they used their background knowledge, asked someone, slowed down, re-read, consulted the dictionary, thought of a word that looked the same, chunked a word or phrase, made predictions and connections, and asked questions, questions, questions (see Figure 4). They read, they wrote, they talked, they wrote, and read again. And still they aren't done. Now they chunk and unpack two more puzzling lines: "wise with time/running rivulets on face"; they struggled over "rivulets" but finally came up with a vivid image of the grandfather's face deeply grooved by age and experience. Amidst this familial gathering, in this safe place where insights and confusions are equally valued, students are energetically practicing their craft. Ever the coach, Rita reminds them, "You see how many of those tools you're using and you don't even know it. What I want you to do is start doing it on purpose. Pretty soon, you won't have to look at that list."

Last spring, as Rita's classes were preparing to take the SAT 9, California's state-mandated standardized achievement test, a student asked her if he could talk to the text during the test. No, she had to tell him, he wasn't allowed to write in the margins of the text booklet, but yes, he could talk to the text in his head. And that's the whole point of Reading Apprenticeship, after all. Drawing on the social support of peers and mentors, Rita's students are learning to reveal the invisible processes associated with reading so the processes can become invisible again, part of the tool kit these aspiring young readers will carry with them as they move out of the familial circle of Rita's classroom.

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