Cracking the Code of Student Engagement: The Bletchley Riddle & Intertextual Approaches to Teaching & Reading YAL

Bios: Dawan Coombs is an associate professor in the English Department at Brigham Young University where she teaches courses in young adult literature and reading and literature methods. Mercedes Allen is a graduate student in the English MA program at Brigham Young University (pictured here on their way to a conference to present about the use of YAL school stories in preservice teacher education, but that’s another blog post for another day). Both are former high school teachers, fans of YAL, and advocates for the use of intertextual experiences to support and engage adolescent readers. You can read more about their work and that of other YAL enthusiasts in Teaching Reading and Literature with Classroom Talk: Dialogical Approaches and Practical Strategies in the Secondary ELA Classroom (2025).

Cracking the Code of Student Engagement: The Bletchley Riddle & Intertextual Approaches to Teaching & Reading YAL
by Dawan Coombs & Mercedes Allen

GJLNS FYYFHP FY IFBS

Are you having trouble making sense of these words? Unless reading ciphers is one of your hobbies, these letters probably seem like a chain of nonsense. Ciphers are secret codes where one letter represents another. In this example, if you shift the letters five slots forward in the alphabet, G becomes B, J becomes E, L becomes G–get the picture? If you crack the code and keep on going, the new message reads like this:

BEGIN ATTACK AT DAWN 

Yikes. 

​Ciphers (including this one), secret codes, riddles, and puzzles play an integral role in The Bletchley Riddle (2025), the World War II historical adventure by two of YA literature's most celebrated writers, Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin. In addition to an intriguing plot, quizzical characters, and fascinating history, readers quickly find themselves puzzling through the mystery alongside the hero and heroine. 

Although these codes are a part of the novel’s charm, they make significant demands of the reader, which led the two of us to consider the way dialogue and intertextual experiences might support and engage adolescents. In the fourth volume of the Handbook of Reading Research, Wilkinson and Son (2014) identify intertextuality—or making sense of texts through reading and experiences with other texts—as an essential component to comprehension. Making meaning of texts through other texts of course means texts that students read, but it also includes oral texts shared by classmates, media, hands-on explorations, and references to events students experience or hear about (p. 374-375). These “texts” also provide information and experiences readers can draw on as they try to make sense of words and ideas and as they dialogue about their reading. 

​In our own experience as teachers and readers, intertextuality in the form of hands-on explorations and shared experiences supports student comprehension, increases student engagement, and generates meaningful dialogue. Our colleagues who teach science and social studies have known this for a long time, as evidenced by the experiments, simulations, and artifacts integrated into their teaching to help students master concepts (McCann et al., 2015; Pahl & Roswell, 2010) and through utilizing practices that intentionally foster intertextual experiences, such as Concept-­Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI) (Guthrie et al., 2004) and Reading Apprenticeship (Schoenbach et al., 2003). But we also see potential to facilitate genuine inquiry and deep reading—especially with YA literature—using intertextual experiences. 

Consider the possibilities for this novel alone. The novel follows two British teens living on the eve of the Battle of Britain: 17-year-old Jakob and his 14-year-old spunky sister Lizzie. Jakob has been recruited to help decrypt secret German codes at Bletchley Park, the secret compound of linguists, mathematicians, chess champions, cryptanalysts, and others working on this part of the war effort. Lizzie has run away to escape being sent to live with her grandma in the United States and then finds herself recruited as well, tasked with delivering confidential notes around the park–as well as embarking on more personal adventures in search of their missing mother who was last seen in Poland. Set against the backdrop of World War II England, this text presents an important part of this part of history that is not commonly talked (or read) about.  

A myriad of dialogical strategies can help students explore the action, intrigue, historical context, and plot of this novel. A few intertextual experiences that would help students make predictions about the plot, map concepts, explore and practice vocabulary, and engage in problem-solving include the following:

Prop Box (Dulaney, 2012). In a prop box, objects and artifacts serve as representations of important symbols, plot points, or ideas in the reading. As students remove objects from the box, they make predictions about the significance of each object in the story and graphically represent these predictions on a concept map. With this novel in particular, these items could provide historical context about life in the UK just before the Battle of Britain. For example, props might include rationed foods, such as sugar, meat, milk, and cheese; a lightbulb, signifying the blackouts at night to prevent nighttime bombings; replica British recruitment posters encouraging young men to support the war effort; or photos of central figures such as Winston Churchill, Joseph Kennedy Sr., and Adolf Hitler. The final item might even be a class Google search of the phrase “Bletchley Park,” which turns up a cipher that eventually decodes itself. 

Simulations (Troyka & Nudelman, 1975; McCann et al., 2015). Simulations immerses students in the conflicts, emotions, and situations similar to those experienced by characters in the novel, ultimately helping students understand and connect to the events and characters. A central element for understanding The Bletchley Riddle includes the complex workings of Enigma, the German machine used to create ciphers. There are several websites that provide an online simulation of Enigma, where students can encrypt or decrypt ciphers. This online simulation could be used during the moments in the text where the characters describe the machine and attempt to use it. Students may not become experts at ciphers, but, like us, they may appreciate more fully how stressful and frustrating it would have been to be in Jakob’s position trying to crack the codes. To simulate the sense of the real-life pressure felt by these codebreakers, consider using a timer to replicate a sense of urgency and a reward of extra credit or early dismissal (it’s harder than you think). 

Spy Hunters (Coombs, 2025): Throughout The Bletchley Riddle, the characters struggle to fully trust one another because of the potential danger of German spies working among them. Sepetys and Sheinkin give the reader bits and pieces about several characters, making it difficult for the reader to fully know who can and can’t be trusted. To tap into this suspense, students can participate in a game called Spy Hunters, where students are placed into four or five groups and given a dossier of information about several characters–complete with photos, background information, and a list of why they may or may not be a German spy. Students talk with each other about the information given and rank each character’s likelihood of being a spy on a scale of one to five, then read with the purpose of collecting additional clues and solving the mystery. 

These intertextual approaches specifically apply to The Bletchley Riddle, but the strategies themselves can be applied to virtually any YA novel or nonfiction text. Teachers we know have used the spy hunter simulation with Sepety’s I Must Betray You (2022), Steve Sheinkin’s Bomb: The Race to Build–and Steal–the World’s Most Powerful Weapon (2012) or his graphic novel adaptation Bomb (2023), illustrated by Nick Bertozzi. Prop boxes provide an engaging way to track symbols, themes and ideas in The Serpent King (2016), All My Rage (2022), or The 57 Bus (2017). And simulations about social norms and otherness connect to themes in The Outsiders, American Born Chinese (2006), Everything Sad is Untrue (2020), or The Poet X (2018). 

You might try these techniques with some of these novels or others like them.

These applications represent just a few of the many ways to provide intertextual experiences that put students in dialogue with the YA books we read in our libraries and classrooms. Neuroscientist and English major Maryanne Wolf (2018) explained that :

Deep reading is always about connection: connecting what we know to what we read, what we read to what we feel, what we feel to what we think, and how we think to how we live out our lives in a connected world.

Utilizing engaging YAL and intertextual experiences into our teaching can help students dialogue about their reading, their lives, and the world, connecting their emotions, questions, and experiences into their reading and learning.