Eat, Drink, and Be Literate

Many students at our alternative high school in Arlington, VA, hail from Central America, East Africa, and East Asia, and have had very little formal education. So four years ago, I collaborated with Margaret Brown, supervisor of young adult services at the Arlington County Public Library, on a lunchtime program designed to help struggling immigrant students develop reading skills by reading for pleasure.

Since our school shares the same building with the Columbia branch library, it serves as our school library. The young adult librarians in our Selections of Arlington Readers (SOAR) program select our books, and we collaborate on everything from booktalking to making sure kids feel comfortable in the library.

Every other Friday, some 20 program participants who have read one or two books independently meet to discuss them with their peers. Students sign up in advance to reserve a spot in our 50-minute sessions, and we hand out slices of pizza and sodas. Small groups of teens sit at six tables, each headed by one facilitator who may be a young adult librarian, teacher, or even our principal. We talk about character development and how the stories relate to our students' own lives, and we ponder the author's intentions. The librarians have trained facilitators to ask open-ended questions such as, "How did you feel about a certain part of the book?" to encourage kids' verbal and critical-thinking skills.

Students are invited to look at publishers' catalogs and they typically choose familiar authors or interesting covers. Then we carefully match students' reading levels with appropriate books. It's important to keep in mind that comprehension is a key factor for English as a Second Language readers. These students may be able to decode the words easily, but if they don't understand their meaning, they become frustrated and lose motivation. When the kids find authors they like—such as Quincy Howe, the author of the Uptown, Downtown series, and Tana Reiff, who wrote the Worktales series (both Globe Fearon)—they tend to read all of their books. Students also are encouraged to write book reviews, which are published in the school newsletter and on SOAR's Web site. We also post annual lists of students' favorite selections, such as Jacqueline Woodson's If You Come Softly (Putnam, 1998).

To encourage more student participation, we have a Spanish-speaking facilitator who helps our librarians acquire books in Spanish that match students' native language reading levels. Popular titles include the El autobús mágico series by Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen and El lugar más bonito del mundo by Ann Cameron.

At the end of our lunchtime sessions, students prepare for their next visit by choosing another book based on recommendations from their peers and our librarians. The county library has a section solely devoted to SOAR, and all SOAR books have a yellow sticker indicating that they are appropriate for a particular reading level. SOAR participants are looked upon positively because they're labeled readers rather than failures.

Word of mouth has helped boost student participation from just four members, in 1999, to 20. We've used a Library Services and Technology Act grant and Friends of the Arlington Library funds to pay for additional books and for food and drinks, which total about $1,800 a year.

Pre- and post-program tests indicate a significant increase in participants' reading comprehension. We measure gains through the Degrees of Reading Power, a standardized reading comprehension test given to all of the county's secondary students. Kids who are in our program have also shown improvement on county-mandated writing tests and our pre- and post-program surveys show more positive attitudes toward reading. Most importantly, our teens have developed the invaluable pleasure of reading, not because it's mandatory, but because it's fun.

Ann Kennedy is a reading specialist at Arlington Career Center High School in Arlington, VA.