Most intervention programs and research-to-practice guides for supporting struggling readers are aimed at elementary school children.
But many older readers have trouble with basic skills, too—and teachers often say they don’t have the resources or knowledge base to support these students.
“It’s not that teachers don’t know their content,” said Katie Keown, a literacy director at the nonprofit educational consulting group Student Achievement Partners, who works with districts to design literacy instruction. It’s that secondary teachers are trained to be English/language arts specialists, she said, with the assumption that students will come to them knowing how to read. That’s not always the case.
“People are desperate for things that will work,” said Keown.
Education Week spoke with researchers and other experts for insight into how secondary teachers can support students with reading difficulties. Older students often have different needs than younger children, and as such, require a tailored approach, researchers say.
“Proficient reading at any age depends on the same underlying processes, but the way we teach those processes evolves with students,” said Jessica Toste, an associate professor of special education at the University of Texas at Austin.
Read on for four guiding principles from experts.
1. Figure out where students’ issues lie. Know that it might be at the word level
Students who are struggling with reading in middle and high school have usually had trouble with reading for years, said Kelly Williams, an associate professor of special education at the University of Georgia. As a result, teachers have a lot of data that can offer insights.
Interim assessments or end-of-year test scores can identify students who aren’t at grade level. Then, diagnostic tests for those children can help educators pinpoint where their difficulties lie—whether with foundational skills like decoding words or with other components of reading like fluency or comprehension, Williams said.
Though many older struggling readers can read short, phonetically regular words like “cat” and “big,” they might have trouble with more complex, multisyllabic words, researchers say.
Sounding out each letter and blending them together, the strategy students would have learned in early grades, works for these short words, said Toste. But students need to more flexibly apply their decoding skills to complex words like “extinction” or “photosynthesis,” she said.
Reading longer words requires students to decode multiple word parts, each with their own vowel sound, and string those together. Struggling readers often need explicit, step-by-step instruction to make that leap.
Without it, “they often omit syllables and they disregard letter information,” said Anita Archer, an educational consultant on explicit instruction and one of the authors of REWARDS, a reading and writing intervention for students in grades 4-12. “They often mispronounce prefixes, mispronounce suffixes, and most importantly, mispronounce vowels.”
2. Rely on guides that compile evidence-based practices
Research-to-practice guides for supporting older readers outline strategies backed by evidence. The Institute of Education Sciences, part of the U.S. Department of Education, has published a guide for interventions for students in grades 4-9 highlighting four recommendations, with examples of how to do each in the classroom:
- Build students’ decoding skills to read multisyllabic words;
- Engage students in fluency practice;
- Use reading-comprehension routines; and
- Give students guided opportunities to read challenging text.
Underpinning these suggestions is a focus on explicitly teaching techniques that students can apply when they’re reading on their own. (IES has also published a more general guide for supporting adolescent literacy.)
REWARDS, for example, Archer’s program, teaches students how to read and spell common prefixes and suffixes and what they mean. It also introduces a routine for attacking unknown multisyllabic words, peeling off the prefix and suffix and decoding the base word.
“This is gradually faded into a covert strategy,” Archer said, something they can use independently in their other classes. “We do not expect them to go into adulthood circling the vowel sounds.”
3. Build both “world and word knowledge” to help students understand what they read
A lot of students can decode words but still struggle with reading. That alone underscores how phonics skills aren’t the only key to better outcomes, said Ginger Collins, a professor in the school of Speech, Language, Hearing and Occupational Sciences at the University of Montana. “It’s extremely important, but it doesn’t end there.”
In its recommendations for improving students’ comprehension skills, the IES practice guide suggests teachers use several research-tested strategies: Give students frequent opportunities to check their understanding of a text, provide them with routines to determine the gist of a passage, and teach them to monitor their own comprehension. But it also instructs teachers to build students’ “world and word knowledge.”
Some of this instruction can be done through morphology, the study of word parts and their meanings, said Collins. Prefixes, suffixes, and words’ Latin and Greek roots can offer clues to an unfamiliar word’s definition.
More broadly, research has shown a positive connection between students’ general background knowledge and their reading-comprehension abilities. Some studies have found that teaching children science or social studies content—and explicitly showing them how to apply those concepts in new contexts—can improve general reading comprehension.
4. Show students why improving their reading skills matters
Many reading interventions for older students are made of the same component parts as interventions for their younger peers, said Williams. But with older students, new wrinkles start to make the picture more difficult. Older students are generally less engaged in school than younger children, and teachers have to handle the feelings of embarrassment or defensiveness that can accompany needing extra help.
“We’re doing explicit, systematic instruction with opportunities for guided practice and corrective feedback,” she said. “But the motivation and engagement, this is kind of the trickier piece.”
Students who have struggled to read for years can feel ashamed and try to hide the problem or stop participating in class altogether, teachers and researchers say.
“You have to help them see the bigger picture,” Williams said, demonstrating how they’ll use what they’re learning in reading interventions in their other classes, so they can see the practical use.
“That’s one of the best ways we can support attention and motivation,” said Student Achievement Partners’ Keown. “We’re telling them, ‘You can do this work. You just need more tools to access the work.’”