Reading Recovery

Getting students to read books has always been a challenge. But the rise of screen-addled adolescence and the temptation of artificial intelligence shortcuts have intensified concern about whether today’s students can muster enough focus for challenging texts.

“There is tons of research telling us students are reading less than in any previous generation,” said Carol Jago, a longtime English literature teacher who serves as associate director of the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA. “There is tremendous urgency in this work for students. I believe this is a hair-on-fire moment.”

Jago’s concern, shared by a range of other speakers across the 2025 AP^® Annual Conference, is that students who fail to cultivate the discipline for deep reading will be at a profound disadvantage in school and in life. Regular readers have more content knowledge, a broader vocabulary, better analytic skills—all critical capacities for academic success.

But more than the impact on schoolwork, Jago is worried about the impact of diminished reading on minds and souls. “I want to convince this generation that reading great books, long works, reading per se is worth doing as a human being!” she said at APAC. “The human race is in danger if we stop reading.”

AP English Literature teachers should embrace some more contemporary books outside the traditional staples of the high school classroom—provided they meet standards of literary quality, Jago said. Titles that grapple with current issues might be more appealing to students attuned to the news and the constant stream of online culture, while still deepening their ability to focus on text and follow an extended narrative. She cited nonfiction titles like When It All Burns, a first-person account of wildland firefighting, and Unforgiving Places, a sociologist’s argument about the hidden causes of street violence. Both books deal with urgent and interesting topics while meeting a standard of writerly quality that makes them worthy of an AP course.

“We have to be able to make these distinctions,” Jago said. “To decide which books are worth bringing into our classroom.” A recent study from the National Council of Teachers of English found that the most-taught books in high school classrooms have barely changed in 35 years, with works like The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Hamlet still dominating the curriculum.

Brandon Abdon, a literature professor at Western Kentucky University and a longtime advocate for creative approaches to high school reading, echoed the call to try and meet students’ organic interests. “If I’m going to teach a couple of the canonical works, maybe there are a couple of other things I could teach, too,” Abdon advised. “How can we awaken interest? How can we engage them while still valuing the novel and still teaching them what we need to teach?”

He recalled his own high school experience with literature as alienating, with his teachers offering little sense of why a Kentucky teenager should care about Charles Dickens or Jane Eyre. Teaching a mix of classics and more regionally relevant contemporary works can help maintain student interest and begin to illuminate the connections between books from different eras. Abdon likes to include works by Colson Whitehead, Zadie Smith, and Marylinne Robinson in his classes, opening conversations about belonging, faith, identity, and culture in contexts students might more easily recognize. “They’re learning about the book, they’re learning to value the book,” he said. “They learn the cultural value of novels and books.”

Abdon also advocates teaching literature in a way that tries to reach even the students who skip the reading. It sounds controversial, he said, but teachers need to accept the reality that for any given book, some percentage of students are going to fail to complete the reading, and you still have a chance to bring the material alive in class. Use the text as a jumping-off point to ask deeper questions and spark broader discussion, showing nonreaders that there’s rich and exciting material to be found in the text they’ve dodged. “Don’t teach text,” he said. “Use text to teach.”

Both Jago and Abdon encouraged teachers to play the long game—to understand that they’re planting seeds that may take a long time to grow. The more reading seems like an analytic chore, the more reluctant readers might withdraw. The goal is to show that reading is compelling, an integral part of a rich and interesting life, and a way of being in conversation with the most important concerns of your time. “This is not just for the sake of the AP Exam,” Abdon said. “This is for the sake of books, of literature.”