When Reading Level and Maturity Level Don’t Align: How We Think About Our Young, Advanced Readers

Let’s say you’re in fifth grade. You’ve already read all the Harry Potter books three times (okay, you’ve read the first one seven times). You know the entire Percy Jackson series by heart. Your start-of-year reading assessment vaulted you comfortably from level Z to level Z+ on the Fountas and Pinnell reading scale, so you’re now clocking in at a high school reading level, and you keep hearing that you need to read more advanced books. Your older sister (who’s also a Z+ reader) and all her friends are raving about a new young-adult masterpiece that’s won all kinds of awards, but the characters are juniors in high school and they do stuff at a party in the very first chapter that makes you want to drop the book and go straight back to Harry Potter. Where do you turn?

This is a challenge we encounter all the time. At Long-View, 64% of our learners are reading at the Z+ level; this indicates a high school level in terms of both literal and inferential comprehension. Of those learners, 79% are in seventh grade or younger, with 18% being in fifth grade. Many (although certainly not all) of these learners are not interested in or emotionally ready for most of the high-school level books getting published today. Young-adult (YA) literature is increasingly skewing older and more mature; while once it tended to target the “12 and up” crowd, nowadays a huge number of YA novels are marketed to readers “14 and up,” feature protagonists in their later high-school years or older, and contain content that would earn an R rating in a movie. Indeed, a large and growing portion of the actual readership of YA novels isn’t even teens; it’s adults. In a School Library Journal article on this topic, Katy Hershberger points out the glaring gap: there are surprisingly few books being published that are tailored for sixth and seventh graders, those readers who demand sophistication and complexity but don’t want the grittiness or intense romance of most YA. 

Importantly, when a learner is assessed at a certain reading level, that level indicates the “just right” edge of their comfort zone where maximum growth as a reader can occur. So while learners certainly can read books at a significantly lower level of text complexity than the level at which they’re assessed, it generally doesn’t help them advance their reading skills quite so much. 

This leaves us with a quandary: when learners zoom to a high school reading level before they are emotionally ready for most young-adult books, how do we help them keep growing as readers?

First, and most simply, we’re always searching very hard for the best literature to fill the gap: books at or near the Z+ level that offer maximum sophistication and richness while fitting the interests and maturity of upper elementary or early middle-school learners.  Outstanding contemporary authors like Gary D. Schmidt, Alicia D. Williams, Frances Hardinge, Jason Reynolds, and Alan Gratz often write within this space. We’re always on the lookout for more, and always appreciate suggestions!

Second, we hold these learners accountable to a higher degree of analytical or interpretive thinking when they read more typical middle-grade books that are age-appropriate but fall below their reading level. Whether in their book club conversations, their writing about reading, or otherwise, we push them to dig into texts on the deepest possible level even when, on the surface, those texts don’t seem challenging to them. Similarly, we may encourage these learners to read books that offer other sorts of challenges or growth opportunities apart from comprehension or reading skills per se (e.g. encountering an unfamiliar culture or historical period).

Third, and most importantly, we try to understand our learners as individual readers as best we can. Some of our learners happily devour YA and adult literature long before high school, learning and growing as readers and as people through those books.  We’ve seen other learners become shocked, disturbed, or simply disinterested. So, through conversations with learners (and their parents), as well as careful observation and frequent discussion amongst the Long-View teaching team, we try to understand the needs and interests of every reader in the school, helping them seek out books that will resonate with them and challenge them in a healthy way, while also encouraging exploration and experimentation.

 If the dilemma we often face with our youngest Z+ readers reveals anything, it’s just how multi-dimensional reading really is — how many radically different skills and types of understanding it draws upon. What a wonderful complexity to embrace as we keep trying to help each of those Harry Potter fans find their next all-time favorite.