More than a decade ago, Moje (2002) asserted that “the fi eld of education has not attended adequately to the literacy learning and development of adolescents” (p. 211). Over the past ten years, research on adolescent literacy development has fl ourished, producing a new body of knowledge that reveals adolescent literacy to be unique and complex, as well as rife with possibiliites, yet beset by challenges and obstacles. Our purpose in the present chapter is to identify the salient issues about tutoring adolescents at risk for their literacy development that had appeared in the published literature as we undertook the ALTUR project. We report the fi ndings from a systematic synthesis of published research undertaken in the summer of 2008 in order to guide the conceptualization of the ALTUR project-both for research purposes, in terms of focusing data collection and analyses, as well as for educational purposes, to inform the tutoring practices we adopted with students the following school year. The issues described as questions in the present chapter are addressed again in Chapter 10 as a means of consolidating the results from the ALTUR project and its contributions to fundamental issues in adolescent literacy education.