Academic Literacy was a year-long course focused on reading strategy development for all ninth graders at Thurgood Marshall Academic High School in the San Francisco Unified School District. Course goals were to help students become engaged, fluent, and competent readers of the variety of texts necessary for them to master to be successful in high school and beyond. Three units--Reading Self and Society, Reading Media, and Reading History--provided the text materials and content of the course. Key components of the course were: sustained silent reading, reciprocal teaching, teacher think alouds, guided reading of exposition, "chunking" (breaking down complex sentences in expository texts to understandable bites), vocabulary building, metacognitive writing and talking about reading processes, and a focus on controlling attention and reading process. To evaluate the course's impact on student learning, standardized measures were collected from the entire ninth grade and a broader set of qualitative measures were collected in two of the four teachers' classrooms, selecting a subset of students in these classrooms for closer study. Both quantitative and qualitative measures were used. Additionally, intensive case studies of 8 of the 30 students were carried out. Results to date, interpretations, and recommendations are discussed. (NKA)