Is Literacy Enough?: Pathways to Academic Success for Adolescents

Q: Do strong early literacy skills guarantee later reading and academic success?

A: No. While early literacy skills are important, they’re not enough to ensure later school success.

Four literacy experts lay out the evidence in this compelling book, based on the well-known Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development that inspired the landmark resource Beginning Literacy with Language.

Following a group of children living in low-income families from preschool through high school, the authors charted the students’ outcomes using test data to reflect language and literacy skills, self-report data reflecting motivation and engagement in school, and interviews with students, teachers, and parents. Through the sobering discoveries made during this long-term study, readers will discover the critical importance of factors such as

• ongoing reading support in middle school and high school, especially in the area of comprehension
• academic and emotional support from teachers and parents
• the intermediate steps needed to achieve long-term goals
• risk factors such as attending multiple schools, family disruption, and social-emotional difficulties

Readers will also see how the specific risk factor of poverty relates to achievement, motivation, and school climate, and how elements of a special education model—more student/teacher interaction, smaller class size, and student directed learning—could enhance the quality of educational programs serving all adolescents.

With this enlightening, meticulously researched book, all education professionals will gain a better understanding of factors critical to school success—and learn how to develop programs that go beyond K–3 literacy to help adolescents reach their full potential.

Prior to beginning her doctoral studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1981, Patton O. Tabors was an elementary school teacher and a childbirth educator. During her doctoral studies she focused on first and second language acquisition in young children. Her qualifying paper and dissertation research, based on 2 years of ethnographic investigation in a nursery school classroom, described the developmental pathway of a group of young children learning English as a second language. She was able to use this information as the basis for the material in One Child, Two Languages: A Guide for Preschool Educators of Children Learning English as a Second Language (Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co., 1997). Since 1987, Dr. Tabors was the research coordinator of the Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development in collaboration with Catherine Snow and David Dickinson. During this time she also directed research related to low-education and low-income mothers reading to their preschool-age children as part of the Manpower Development Research Corporation evaluations of two welfare-to-work projects, New Chance and JOBS, and for the Harvard Language Diversity Project, a subproject of the New England Research Center on Head Start Quality, directed by David Dickinson. Dr. Tabors's latest research, a longitudinal project that was following the language and literacy development of Spanish-speaking children from preschool to second grade, combined her interests in early language and literacy development and second language acquisition in young children.