Last school year, I took a college course that required hours of field experience in a high school English class. I was able to observe different English lessons and different school levels. What really struck me was hearing some of these high school students have more reading difficulties than the third grade students I taught in the same school year. These students were required to read and understand grade-level text when reading at the elementary level. Illiteracy “is considered the darkest mark of a person's academic success and the greatest failure of the American school system” (Tchudi and Tchudi 75) and there are approximately twenty-five million functionally illiterate people in the United States. United States (75). Why do our middle and high school students still have reading difficulties? What can English/language arts teachers do to help these struggling readers? The causes of reading difficulties are often due to learning disabilities such as dyslexia, poor preparation before entering school, lack of value for literacy, poor school attendance, reading instruction insufficient and/or even the way in which students learned to read from the first years of school. The struggles that students “encounter at school can be seen as socially constructed – by the way schools are organized and programmed, by the assumptions made about family life and academic abilities, by a curriculum that is often devoid of connections with students. lives, and by texts that may be too difficult for students to read” (Hinchman and Sheridan-Thomas166). Whatever the reason for the initial existence of the reading problem, “by the time a [student] reaches the intermediate levels, there is good evidence that he or she will continue reading until the middle of the test…. ..ilding Reading Proficiency at the Secondary Level: A Guide to Resources. =ED458562>.Serafini, Frank and Cyndi Giorgis. Reading Aloud and Beyond: Fostering Intellectual Life with Older Readers Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003. Print.Tchudi, Susan J, and Stephen Tchudi. Classroom Strategies for Teachers. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1999. Print. Tovani, Cris I Read It, But I Don't Understand: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers, 2000. Print. UNITED STATES. Reading to Succeed: A Governor's Guide to Adolescent Literacy Washington: National Governors Association, 2005. Print..