Are teenagers actually reading less? What the OECD report on literacy really means for parents and teachers
On a grey Tuesday morning, I handed out a short article to my ninth-grade English class. It was about a local farm that had switched to solar power—something I thought would at least hold their attention. I gave them ten minutes to read it and annotate three things they found interesting or confusing.
Within two minutes, half the room had given up.
“This is too long,” said Marcus, pushing the paper away. He was holding a pencil, not a phone. He just didn’t want to read the paragraph. Another student, Ava, had read the first sentence three times and asked if she could “just watch a video about it instead.”
This is a familiar scene in classrooms right now. It’s also the same picture painted by the latest OECD report on teenage literacy. According to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), reading scores among 15-year-olds have fallen significantly in many countries, including English-speaking ones. The headlines were swift: teenagers are becoming less literate.
But after ten years of teaching, I’m not sure that’s the whole truth. It’s not that they can’t read. They just read very differently than we do. And that difference is starting to look like a deficit in the wrong places.
The report focuses on sustained, complex reading—long passages, nuanced arguments, texts that ask you to hold onto multiple ideas at once. That’s the kind of reading PISA measures. It’s also the kind of reading that most teenagers do less and less of in their daily lives. Their reading is fragmented: social media posts, group chats, captions, comments, search results. Quick, reactive, concrete. The kind of reading that gives you an answer, a feeling, or a laugh in under ten seconds.
At first glance, that doesn’t look like literacy to adults. But I’ve watched the same student who can’t finish a two-page article spend forty minutes following a complex thread about a video game lore, or switching between four different tabs to research a hobby. They are literate in a different ecosystem—one that doesn’t show up on a paper-based test.
Still, that doesn’t mean we should ignore the report. The problem is real in one important way: the stamina to sit with difficult text is fading. And stamina matters for almost everything beyond school—from reading a rental lease to understanding a medical form to evaluating a news article about a political issue.
I started paying closer attention to what was happening in my classroom. Marcus wasn’t lazy. When I sat next to him and asked him to read the first paragraph aloud, he read it perfectly. He just couldn’t tell me what it meant afterwards. His eyes moved across the lines, but his attention had already wandered. He was decoding without entering the text. That’s not a phonics problem. It’s an engagement and endurance problem.
What I’ve learned is that teenagers haven’t lost the ability to read. They’ve lost the habit of inhabiting a text—of slowing down enough to let words form images, questions, and connections in their minds.
So what can a parent or teacher actually do? Not the big, dramatic solution. Just the everyday ones.
One thing that works is reading with them, even when they’re old enough to read on their own. This sounds obvious, but many parents stop reading aloud to kids once they hit middle school. I tell parents all the time: it’s okay to read a paragraph of a news article, a textbook page, or even a recipe out loud to your teenager, then stop mid-way and ask, “What do you think that word means?” or “Why would they say that?” This is not babying. It’s modelling what inner reading sounds like—pausing, questioning, re-reading.
In class, I changed how I assign reading. Instead of “Read pages 12–20,” I now give a short passage and a specific task that requires them to return to the text. For example, “Find two places where the author seems biased, and explain why.” The task gives a purpose, and the purpose gives them a reason to push through the discomfort of the text.
Another concrete strategy is to create a low-stakes reading environment at home. I have a friend whose son wouldn’t read books for his English class, but he would read long articles about skateboard culture. She started leaving printed articles on the kitchen counter—not books, just interesting long-form pieces from magazines and websites. No pressure. Just availability. After a few weeks, he started telling her about them. That’s the beginning of sustained reading: a quiet opportunity, not a lecture about the dangers of screen time.
I’ve also started being more explicit about the difference between “reading for fun” and “reading for understanding.” Teenagers often think that if they don’t enjoy a text, they can’t read it. I now say things like, “This one’s a work text. You won’t love it. But we’re going to read it twice: once for the gist, once for deeper meaning.” Naming the experience helps them accept it. They stop waiting to be entertained and start realising that some reading is just effortful.
The OECD report is useful because it gives us a mirror. But it’s not a verdict. Literacy is not a fixed trait—it’s a set of habits, and habits can shift. I’ve seen students like Marcus go from hating reading to tolerating it, and a few, eventually, to finding a kind of quiet satisfaction in finishing a chapter that required something from them.
There’s no neat ending here. The work is ongoing. I still get frustrated when half the class sighs at the sight of a full paragraph. I still worry that the gap between their digital reading skills and their academic reading skills will cost them later. But I’ve also started to notice something small: when I ask them to read slowly, out loud, with me, they do it. They’re not lost. They’re just out of practice.
Maybe the real question isn’t whether teenagers are becoming less literate. It’s whether we’re willing to help them build the muscles they’ve never needed before—one sentence at a time.
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