ABSTRACT
The fi eld of adolescent literacy is engaged in a continual struggle with what it means to promote comprehension. Starting out as content area reading, the fi eld was preoccupied with developing teaching activities for learning from texts. For nearly 20 years, from the early 1960s until the early 1990s, proponents of content area reading, and then content area literacy, recognizing the integrated roles of reading, writing, speaking and listening (McKenna & Robinson, 1990), churned out one teaching activity after another for fostering comprehension. The names of these activities are ubiquitous-semantic maps and graphic organizers, anticipation guides, three-level guides, journaling, I-searches, and the list goes on and on. A compendium of these activities is in its sixth edition (Tierney & Readance, 2004).
