Cultivating a ‘third space’ to boost teen literacy

The home and the classroom by themselves often may not offer the best environment for encouraging adolescents to read. Adolescent literacy in Malaysia is deficient, with 162,000 primary or secondary school Malaysian students being rated as illiterate. Malaysian learners' overall English literacy rate was only 27.2 percent. Adolescent literacy targets students aged 13 to 17, a stormy phase, but literacy research has centred mostly around early literacy skills as well as adult literacies. Comparatively little attention is given to how to sustain and upskill adolescent literacy. US literacy advocate, Joan Sedita has said that adolescent literacy should not be just limited to teenagers but should be expanded to students in grades 4 to 12. The axiom is that up to grade 3, students are learning to read, but beginning in grade 4 they shift to reading to learn, making grade 4 the logical place to make the jump from early literacy to adolescent literacy