Do you know Glenn? Maybe you’ve had Glenn—or an adolescent reader like him—as a student. His reading scores on standardized tests are middle-of-the-pack. But if you shadow Glenn through a typical day, you’ll discover that he’s a reader of eclectic interests with a repertoire of distinct, somewhat idiosyncratic ways of reading he habitually resorts to when reading in particular contexts, for particular purposes.

(Note: “Glenn” is a composite. The following vignettes of Glenn reading draw on interview and think-aloud data collected from two sixth-graders who each described and demonstrated more than 10 different ways of reading they use on a regular basis.)

• Lying on the couch, reading a graphic novel, Hereville, for pleasure, Glenn’s gaze flits across the page, bouncing back and forth between words and pictorial details, adjusting its path from page to page as the layout of panels changes. He enjoys the speed with which the story unfolds. He also enjoys noticing details in the drawings that clash with what a character has said or what a character is thinking.
• In the car, on his smartphone, text-messaging with his friends, Glenn alternates between reading and typing. He has made a game of trying to anticipate what his friends will type next in response to what he has just typed, and with some friends, on some topics, he bats 1000. He also has strong views about how emojis can be more persuasive than words in some conversations because their meaning is often fuzzy and open to interpretation.
• Sitting in his sixth-grade social studies classroom, reading his social studies textbook, Glenn’s go-to method is to turn the information on the page into a movie in his head. This works well on some pages (e.g., with descriptions of wars and battles) and less well on others (e.g., with information about changing agricultural methods). With his textbook, he also sometimes voices the words in his head in the style of a play-by-play sports announcer—which he says helps him stay focused when the information is boring.
• In the cafeteria at lunch with his “gamer” friends, Glenn co-reads a how-to book about a favorite video game (e.g., Minecraft: Redstone Handbook). When he is not  reading, he is envisioning game situations in which a particular how-to tip could be applied. As Glenn and his friends exchange ideas, they interrupt each other with objections and alternate ideas, which sends everyone back to the book to check for details that support or disqualify their ideas.
• At the dining room table, at his mother’s laptop, Glenn searches a video-game wiki (e.g., Minecraft Wiki) for usable information and now also with an eye for authorship and sourcing. A few months ago, a friend who tried to add a new page to the wiki had that page deleted by a more senior wiki author/administrator, and this event sparked Glenn’s curiosity. Now he uses a reading process that looks at the “layers” under the wiki’s top layer. He looks at the history of the page he’s on and enjoys scanning the “talk” page to see the disagreements among editors about what the page should include or exclude.
• Still on his mother’s laptop, having logged into his account at a popular learn-how-to-code website (e.g., CodeCombat.com), Glenn composes lines of code, clicks Run to see how the code he has written changes the movements of a digital character, and then meticulously rereads what he has written to fix mistakes. He’s keenly aware that even a single letter or punctuation mark in the wrong place can cause a problem.

From Glenn’s point of view, these ways of reading are all different. They look and feel as different as playing different sports. To be sure, they are all forms of reading (just as different ball sports are all ways of using your body to get a ball into some kind of net), but they are also at the same time significantly different, both in terms of how much he enjoys them and cares about them, and in terms of the cognitive processes and strategies he’s using when he enacts one or another.

Which is why Glenn sometimes tunes out when his ELA teacher tells him and his classmates about “what good readers do.”

Narrow characterizations fail to recognize and leverage the diverse types of reading experiences and expertise that diverse students bring to the classroom, to the page, and to the screen. And that’s a big missed opportunity. As students’ ways of reading diversify, and as students bring more and more specialized reading expertise and varied reading MOs to the classroom, it behooves us as teachers to enlarge our awareness—and to find ways to build on what our students know and do as readers, even when what they know and do is not the academic reading we privilege.

Paul Morsink is an assistant professor in Reading and Language Arts at Oakland University in Michigan.

This article is part of a series from the International Literacy Association’s Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).