Noting a renewed interest in and dedication to the rights and needs of adolescent readers, this digest addresses the development of content area reading, discusses recent reconceptualizations of the field, and offers a new model for classroom practice. It begins with a brief description of the historical context of literacy development in the secondary grades, focusing on developments in cognitive psychology in the 1970s and 1980s, and more recent efforts to move away from viewing reading solely as a cognitive process. The digest then discusses recent efforts to conceptualize the reading process as including a social dimension, literacy practices beyond the classroom, an expanded notion of text, and the relationship between literacy and identity. It concludes with a description of the Reading Apprenticeship model, an instructional framework based on the dual notions of literacy as a complex cognitive and social process and of teaching as cognitive apprenticeship. (Contains 19 references.) (RS)