Ramp-Up Literacy includes advanced phonics instruction for those who need it and provides all students with instruction in fluency.

Fluency is not just a matter of reading quickly. Fluent readers read with appropriate expression, intonation, and pacing. They sound natural when they read aloud. Ramp-Up Literacy helps striving readers acquire fluency by hearing, seeing, and applying strategies used by advanced readers.

In addition to providing explicit whole-class and small-group instruction, teachers meet with students regularly to listen to them read aloud, offer supportive comments, and build students’ confidence as readers.

Most middle and high school students who have reading difficulties can decode words. Their problem is that they cannot understand the words they read. They have trouble connecting the words, phrases, and sentences into meaningful ideas.

Comprehension is not an automatic result of reading. Comprehension needs to be taught.

In Ramp-Up Literacy, teachers model important comprehension skills, such as logically linking the ideas in the text, breaking text into manageable units, using spelling and morphological patterns to read challenging words, and using punctuation to cue phrasing and intonation.

Teachers also provide direct, explicit guidance in using reading comprehension strategies—and combine this instruction with classroom discussions and writing assignments. In fact, Ramp-Up Literacy combines reading and writing purposefully, because reading and writing are related skills that, taught properly, reinforce one another.

Beginning on the first day of Ramp-Up Literacy, teachers introduce the structures and procedures that readers and writers use to work productively. These classroom management routines enable teachers to work with students flexibly—as a whole class, in small groups, and individually during a 90-minute block—all year long.

Teachers believe this built-in classroom management is one of the most powerful features of Ramp-Up Literacy.

In this structured learning environment, disaffected students develop into engaged and motivated learners, often for the first time in their lives. Ramp-Up to Middle-Grade Literacy and Ramp-Up to Advanced Literacy share the same format and teaching approaches to accelerate progress for students who are two or more years behind grade level when they enter middle or high school. But the classroom libraries and reading topics are different, designed to appeal to middle or high school students. Reading materials are age-appropriate and reading topics are among those that students typically encounter in middle or high school.

Ramp-Up Literacy doesn’t just teach literacy, but makes striving readers more effective, self-sufficient learners, helping to break the cycle of failure and establish a pattern of success that carries over to other classes as well. Students who are motivated to learn are more likely to stay in school.

Ramp-Up Literacy is specifically designed to help the lowest performing students make rapid progress in reading and writing. Further, ELL researchers participated fully in the course design, making the course highly responsive to the needs of these student learners. A good deal of flexibility is built in to the curriculum, and it can be adapted easily to account for multiple learning styles.

In Ramp-Up Literacy professional development sessions, trainers routinely model small-group classroom activities for ELL and special education students. America’s Choice also offers expert advice and consulting on how to customize classroom libraries, modify curriculum units, and design work periods that specifically address the needs of these students.

Plenty of firms are now rushing to market with instructional packages designed to address the adolescent literacy crisis.

America’s Choice has developed its program over many years, taking all the time necessary to do the job right. Almost a decade ago, we gathered the nation’s leading researchers on reading and writing and asked them to describe the ideal course of study. Today, we’re still at the cutting edge of the field.

We constantly refine our programs to reflect the latest research, such as the 2004 Reading Next report. Widely hailed as a thorough, nonpartisan review of contemporary research on adolescent literacy, Reading Next documents the specific practices that—according to firm, trustworthy evidence—promote basic reading comprehension as well as higher-level skills in reading and writing. Taking its cue from this work, Ramp-Up Literacy emphasizes a number of key principles, making it the most complete instructional system available today.