Reading and writing are reciprocal skills. Just as a skilled runner might cross-train by lifting weights to improve their agility and speed, so can a writer strengthen their craft by reading adeptly, widely, and with precision.
But reading is in danger. In the U.S., the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) conducted a 2024 analysis of reading proficiency among 6th and 8th grade students across the country. Results showed significant declines, revealing “the average reading score for the nation at grade 8 was 2 points lower than 2022 and 5 points lower compared to 2019… [and] [c]ompared to the first reading assessment in 1992, the average score was not significantly different in 2024” (p. 1). What’s more, fewer schools are assigning full texts—novels, plays, biographies—for students to read, instead providing excerpts of canonical works and probing students to identify the main ideas.
There is much that is lost when we move toward this lite approach to reading and analysis. While summaries may have their time and place in the real world, just as artificial intelligence text generation may augment particular types of work in praxis, the cognitive, relational, and affective skills inherent in the literacy process—analysis, perspective-taking, inquiry, memorization, interdisciplinary knowledge integration—are irreplaceable and urgently needed.
Ultimately, the NAEP results underscore the need to support students’ reading and writing skills in tandem, no matter the part of the world in which you teach. The following suggestions illuminate ways to use the Write the World community and platform to do so for middle and high school students, while simultaneously expanding students’ perspectives by exposing them to teen-authored works written around the world.
Literary analysis is the hallmark of language arts curricula, yet often students’ least favorite form of writing. One reason for their resistance may be the ways in which traditional literatures feel removed—their relevance not always immediately apparent to middle and high school students in our modern world.
By contrast, the Write the World website comprises an immense library of multi-genre works written by fellow students from over 120 countries. In 2024 alone, teenagers wrote in more than 35 genres—far more than the traditional four taught in language arts classrooms.
For your next literary analysis assignment, try selecting a piece—a poem, personal narrative, or short story—from the Write the World dashboard or literary review for your students to analyze. Whether through reflective memos, five-paragraph essays, or literature reviews that assess the work, you can scaffold the same analytical reading skills as you would for Yeats or Shakespeare, Morrison or Rumi—identification of rhetorical devices, analyses of their impact on the message of the work, critiques of writing/argument/plot/voice, the parsing of context and allusion, and more.
The U.S. Common Core State Standards for reading emphasize students’ ability to compare and contrast literary and informational texts. To extend the peer-to-peer nature of your literacy curriculum, consider building on students’ analyses of Write the World works by inviting comparative work.
In the Write the World dashboard, you can serve by theme or topic to identify works that engage similar themes from different vantage points. Perhaps a student will compare nature poems penned in India and Canada or the use of figurative language in short stories written by 14 and 19 year olds. Additionally, you can filter your and your students’ reading experiences by genre; select the circular “tag” button in the upper right corner of your dashboard, then filter to see only, say, creative nonfiction or fantasy in your feed.
These exercises foster the comparative analytical thinking central to deep thought and encouraged by standards, but they also exceed those goals by also inviting students’ considerations of cultural and geographic context, among other considerations of identity, inviting them to find similarities across differences.
Another Common Core State Standard, CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.8.9, requires students to:
“Analyze how a modern work of fiction draws on themes, patterns of events, or character types from myths, traditional stories, or religious works such as the Bible, including describing how the material is rendered new.”
Though this particular quote is from the eighth grade standards, this central task spans secondary grade levels.
To introduce a third level of challenge—building upon the introduction of analysis and comparative analysis of peer-authored works—consider asking students to analyze how a modern work of fiction from the traditional literary canon (e.g., your course text) and a teen-authored piece on Write the World both allude to themes, patterns of events, or character types form myths, traditional stories, or religious works. You might begin by exploring entries to Write the World’s fairytales and myths competition.
If your students are still working up to this multistream analysis, consider swapping the course text or “modern work of fiction” for a Write the World piece, keeping students’ reading to just one central piece, plus those to which it alludes and build upon.
Do you have other strategies for teaching reading at the secondary level, or ways you’re using Write the World to support literacy education? We are always eager to hear from (and profile!) teachers like you. Reach out to us at educators@writetheworld.org to share more about your work.