Dacula, Ga.
The lights are low, the room hushed in Jaime Johnson’s 7th grade class on a Tuesday morning this fall, as her students each take turns reading aloud from the novel they’re studying.
Johnson stops every page or so to ask a question or prompt kids to discuss a detail with a partner. But much of her nearly hour-long period is filled with alternating student voices, some loud, clear, and expressive; many more tentative, occasionally stumbling over word pronunciations that she gently corrects. Soft “ooohs” of surprise ripple across the room at tense moments in the plot. Every few minutes, a rustle of pages punctuates the story as students turn the page in unison.
This isn’t a one-off exercise in Johnson’s classroom at Dr. Mary Kay Murphy Middle School in Georgia’s Gwinnett County schools. Her 7th graders have read most of the book—Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin—together, out loud, in class. When they start the classic novel The Outsiders later this semester, they’ll read most of that in class too. They’re not required to take the books home.
For Johnson, in-class communal reading is the most practical solution to an increasingly thorny problem in today’s reading classes: Teens and tweens won’t—or perhaps can’t—do the reading on their own.
The vast majority of middle and high school teachers assign whole-class novels, national survey data show. And researchers agree that asking students to do at least some sustained, deep reading benefits their literacy skills.
But the classic approach to teaching novels—read a chapter or two at home, and come ready to discuss in class—doesn’t work anymore, some secondary teachers say.
More than half of educators said the reading stamina of students in grades 3-8 had dropped since 2019, according to a 2024 EdWeek Research Center survey. In a separate EdWeek Research Center survey, from 2025, educators cited motivation, reading fluency, and stamina as the main reasons middle and high schoolers in their schools struggled with reading.
“I have no confidence in what is being read at home,” Johnson said. Some of her students have gaps in foundational reading skills that make it even more challenging to parse grade-level texts; all of them are facing the near-constant presence of digital distractions.
As these educators search for ways to get students engaged in texts, and willing to sustain the reading, some are turning to methods that might seem more familiar to educators in younger grades—pairing novel reading with instructional support in fluency or other foundational skills, and doing more of the reading out loud, together in class.
In an EdWeek Research Center survey conducted this fall, about a third of middle school teachers said they read to their students daily. Most middle and high school teachers—65%—said half or more of the reading they ask students to do during the year is completed in class.
Some researchers, though, say teachers might want to proceed with caution: It’s not clear if hearing books read aloud gives students enough practice with the skills they need to become independent readers in the long term.
“I can only do the best I can with what I have,” Johnson said. “And what I have is time to put a book back in their hand, time to teach them what reading sounds like.”
Is students’ ability to parse long-form text declining?
Teachers trying to figure out how to get their students to read assigned books is hardly a new problem. Students have been skimming for decades. Spark Notes has been around for more than 25 years, and comic book versions of classic books for more than 50.
Still, educators say there are new headwinds at their efforts. Students now in middle and high school spent large chunks of their elementary reading education in pandemic-era classrooms, where curricula was often delivered via devices or Zoom calls: “They learned to read, they learned to decode words, through a screen,” said Johnson, of her current 7th graders.
Separately, reading increasingly competes for time with time spent on apps, games, and short-form video—both during and outside of the school day.
National survey data show that teenagers say they’re less interested in reading for pleasure, and doing slightly less of it outside of school. This isn’t just limited to kids who were already weaker readers, said Deborah Reed, the director of the Tennessee Reading Research Center at the University of Tennessee Knoxville.
“It’s all groups that we’re noticing are not devoted to reading as much, expressing dislike for reading, choosing shorter options,” she said.
Still, lab studies show that even kids who spend a lot of time on screens don’t have a reduced ability to devote their attention to a discrete task and persist, said Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia.
“What teachers say they’re seeing, I suspect it’s real,” he said. “But it doesn’t reflect students’ ability to pay attention. It reflects students’ reluctance to pay attention.”
To persist with long-form text in the classroom, students need to internalize that print is worth their time, Willingham said.
Giving students ‘the experience of being an expert reader’
Reviews of research on improving students’ reading motivation offer clues about what might get that message across. Students are more motivated to read when it’s a social activity and they can talk with their peers about the book. And they’re more engaged when texts seem relevant, interesting, or otherwise important to their lives.
There’s no step-by-step guide that translates these general findings into a prescription for teaching novels. Some programs have seen success in research studies, though.
One couples lots of foundational reading support with novel reading. The program, called Strategic Adolescent Reading Intervention, or STARI, is designed for struggling readers in middle and high school. It’s a separate intervention added to students’ regular English/language arts class, and includes explicit lessons in decoding and fluency—skills that might be preventing teenagers from accessing more complex texts.
But students also study young adult novels. They read independently in short chunks in class, pausing after each to discuss with the whole group or a partner. Two randomized studies have shown that middle schoolers who received STARI outperformed similar peers who had business-as-usual instruction.
While STARI is an intervention, some research on other whole-class approaches have shown promising results, too.
In 2015, researchers at the University of Sussex in England sought to find out what would happen if teachers prioritized reading volume.
They asked 20 English teachers in Year 8, the U.S. equivalent of 7th grade, to read two novels back to back with their students over the course of 12 weeks. This was a much faster pace than students were used to, as they usually read two books over an entire year. All of the reading was done in class, often with the teacher reading aloud.
The study didn’t include a control group, meaning it’s impossible to know whether this approach specifically is what made the difference for student outcomes. But students in these classes made the equivalent of 8.5 months of average progress in the 12 weeks of the study.
In the decade since it was published, the researchers report that at least 200 schools across England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland have adopted the model, now known as “Faster Read.”
“The logic that underpins Faster Read is that if you read a whole text, more quickly, everybody in the room stands a better chance of understanding that story,” said Cathy Savage, the curriculum leader for English at Heathfield Community College, a school in East Sussex, England that serves children ages 11-18 and uses the method.
The English national curriculum requires meaty texts for middle-school aged children—world literature, English literature from before 1914 as well as contemporary works, and at least two Shakespeare plays.
Before Heathfield started following the Faster Read approach, Savage said, teachers would assign chapters for homework and then spend class time doing activities and discussion. “You end up with a text that is so stretched over such a long period that especially your weaker students have trouble holding on to it at all,” she said.
In essence, Faster Read reorders how lessons are carried out. Teachers frontload the reading in class. They do quick comprehension checks and recaps of the plot each lesson, but the bulk of literary analysis comes after the novel is finished.
“Plot is king,” Savage said. “Because [students are] confident in the story, and confident in their understanding of the narrative, it’s much easier then to get them to focus on extracts and passages and how the language is being used.”
Listening to teachers reading also gives kids an important fluency model, Savage said. Struggling students get the “the experience of being an expert reader,” she said, even if they have below-grade-level skills.
How reading aloud gives teachers a ‘pulse check’ on students’ skills
In Johnson’s classroom in Georgia, too, the opportunity to model and practice reading fluency is a key factor in her decision to have students read aloud, together.
“At some point, we decide that teenagers can read in their heads,” Johnson said. “But at what point are we ever pulse checking what that sounds like?”
The model Johnson uses gives her that pulse check every day, often for every student, she said. It’s called FASE reading, which stands for Fluent, Attentive, Social, and Expressive, developed by Teach Like a Champion, a professional development organization.
Ahead of each day’s lesson, Johnson previews the chapters they’re going to read in class, assigning each student a short passage to read aloud. She tries to match struggling readers with passages that she knows they can read successfully, while also giving them a chance to practice skills they’re learning—like correctly parsing ellipses, italics, and exclamation points to read with expression.
Johnson intentionally plans these teaching moments. “It’s not popcorn reading,” she said, referencing a long-used strategy in which teachers call on students at random to read a sentence or paragraph.
In her classroom at Murphy Middle School in September, Johnson called on students in succession to read aloud, as the rest of the class followed along silently in their open books. She paused to offer corrections when students stumbled over tricky syntax or had trouble pronouncing words like “begrudged,” “barren,” and “resentment.” At times, she asked them to reread sentences out loud as a group, practicing how to draw out an ellipsis or punctuate an exclamation point.
Every few pages, she stops, asking comprehension questions and prompting students to turn and talk with a partner or write a response. Why does this character have a difficult decision to make? Are you surprised by what they chose? Why does this moment represent the end of their quest?
Often, she underscores important plot turns or explains literary devices, like embedded narratives. “This is such a big deal,” she says, as one character takes responsibility for a mistake she made for the first time.
Reading together provides these in-the-moment opportunities for discussion and analysis, said Colleen Driggs, the managing director of curriculum and school support for Teach Like a Champion, in an interview.
“The discussion is much more specific, and you’re able to go much deeper, because it’s fresh on everybody’s mind,” she said.
In Johnson’s class, students have lots of chances to talk, sharing their analysis with partners and the class. Johnson invites disagreement over predictions and characters’ motivations. But she also relies heavily on explicit instruction, spelling out parts of the story that could be ambiguous or confusing. The process is teacher-led by design, Johnson said.
“It’s a shared experience,” Johnson said, in an interview. “We’re all going to get to the same understanding at the same time at the same place, and then we move on when we’ve all got it.”
Does communal reading offer too much support?
In part, teachers read in class to reduce uncertainty: They know that kids are doing the reading, and understanding the reading, if it happens in front of them.
But requiring less independent reading introduces new unknowns, said Reed, the University of Tennessee Knoxville professor. Chief among them: Does it help kids become better readers when they’re reading independently?
“Are students really following along with eyes on print while the teacher’s reading?” she asked. “Because if not, then it’s listening comprehension, not reading comprehension.”
It’s also hard to know whether students are getting the practice they’ll need later to succeed on a standardized reading test, where they’ll be required to read passages silently on their own, she said.
“You don’t want this to be the end game,” said Willingham, the University of Virginia professor, of students mostly listening to text rather than reading independently.
But Driggs, with Teach Like a Champion, said communal oral reading plays an important transitional role.
“In the long run, independent reading is going to be important, but we want to make sure it’s productive,” she said. “The read-alouds and the FASE that’s happening, that’s going to improve students’ comprehension and their inner reading voice when they are reading independently.”
At Murphy, Johnson said, 7th graders need heavy handed support. But they won’t forever.
“As a school, we’re two grade levels behind in reading. … I’ve got to not only fill that gap, but I’ve got to make sure that the gap doesn’t continue to widen,” she said. Eventually, she’ll pause less frequently while students are reading, and she’ll use less structured prompts. By the end of 7th grade, students will have read at least four novels—five if Johnson can squeeze in an extra one amid state testing in the spring.
The training wheels will come off. But for now, they stay on, she said.
“They’re still so new at this.”