g their first year of post-secondary school enrollment. Forty-five percent of undergraduates who enrolled in some kind of remedial course in 1999 enrolled in remedial writing courses, and 35 percent enrolled in remedial reading courses. Once they apply for a job, 73 percent of employers rate the writing skills of high school graduates as fair or poor. As many as 40 million adults have low literacy skills and are not capable of reading their pay stub accurately to determine their amount of gross pay they earned.
Clearly, something needs to be done to address the problem of literacy in adolescents. The National Reading Panel has identified five basic components of literacy instruction for elementary students which can be applied to adolescents: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension (Every, 2003). Many programs have been initiated to address these issues, including Strategic Reading from Johns Hopkins University, Strategic Instruction by Deshler at the University of Kansas, and Language, by Jane Fell Greene.
The Orange County Literacy Project in Florida uses the Peabody Learning Lab interactive software system combined with a literacy workshop model which allowed their students to make almost twice as much progress as the national norm, and the more than 10,000 students who have participated in the project since 1994 have gained an average of one or two years in their reading grade level each year (Daley, 1999, 23). Typical 90-minute literacy workshops beg
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