The science of reading movement has focused on improving phonics instruction for children in the early grades, but it has largely overlooked students at higher grade levels.
When I taught 8th grade, I had about 30% of my students reading 4th grade level and lower and about 20% of my students reading at a college level. I remember the stark realization that my reading material and curriculum was designed for only 50% of my class and worked so hard that year to bring in differentiated content that I often had to make up on my own to better fit the interests and developmental levels of my students who deserved content rich material. Good news is that the results were positive for students in terms of their growth in reading competence and confidence. Bad news is that it was exhausting, lonely work. I am so glad there are more resources now and to see in this post that there's more attention being given to the need for higher quality, age-appropriate reading skills materials for the higher grade levels.
Thank you for the work you did, it matters. I wish teachers were celebrated, respected, and compensated more. Why teachers aren’t seen as the noblest humans with the most awe-inspiring job to have, is lost on me ✨👏🏼💕
Readers' Theater is a great technique! I used it a lot with my high school English students before I retired. I would give them an overview of what we were going to read for the day without providing any spoilers. Then I would read the exposition and let students volunteer for which character they wanted to read aloud. The more adept readers would usually volunteer for the longer parts and the struggling readers usually wouldn't volunteer but would read aloud if I promised them that it was a small part (they still had to pay attention to know when to come in.) I intentionally picked literary works with enriched content but which had a fair amount of dialogue. Plays of course were especially great for this but novels and short stories could also work well.
I might comment on difficult or puzzling portions of the text as we read along or I could stop if a student had a question. It also gave me a chance to talk about words that didn't make sense phonetically like the word "indict" or the word "row" which has a different pronunciation depending on the meaning.
I sometimes had administrators question whether or not this was an effective use of class time. But one year they had us study the current brain research, which advocated this technique, especially because hearing all the different voices keeps the brain engaged. That gave me a little more cred.
I might add that Readers' Theater is not the same as having all the students as a group reading aloud one line or one sentence at a time, which is demonstrably not an effective technique.
I can't believe experts in the K-12 education system still haven't figured out what's wrong after 50 yrs. of abject failure. Here's a hint: Concluding that test scores are lower, which they've been saying for decades, means test scores were once higher.
So, where's the most logical place to start? What has to be step one? As you abandon the notion that new is better (new is just new) and become willing to trade all those different programs and online nonsense for something really simple, go back to when scores were higher --- prior to post-1970 reforms that have failed miserably --- and examine and evaluate the curriculum, starting with K-6, from the perspective that children under six learn best through play, and the ability for all children to learn improves with play.
Knowing that, what can you do today that will improve life and learning for K-6 kids right away by giving them that time to play and just be kids? STOP WITH THE HOMEWORK ALREADY. I had a far superior K-6 education without an ounce of homework. My ability to write and comprehend complex sentences is exceptional, but it didn't happen through osmosis nor did it happen all at once or by the time I graduated from HS or even college. It's the result of the 1950s structured classroom and curriculum sans technical devices that gave me such a solid foundation that I was able to constantly improve.
Get rid of all technology for K-6. It's a waste of time (and $) for them and does nothing for social skills and class participation.
The article mentions difficulty with complex sentences. There is a method from that curriculum that not only teaches sentence structure, but my research, such as it is, has found it does far more for students in the way it aids both comprehension and cognitive development. There's more to say about that, but, essentially, one's ability to think can be no better than one's mastery of language.
Those standardized tests are all about reading comprehension. Even some of the math questions are word problems. There's absolutely no reason our kids can't do well on those tests. And you won't need to be concerned with performance in the upper grades so long as teachers are willing to correct their writing. Self-esteem is born of self-respect which comes from accomplishment, from doing one's best, so self-esteem isn't hurt by correcting their writing and expecting their best.
Twenty percent of all kids have dyslexia. 4-8% of students have dysgraphia. (probably an underestimate) Then we have dyscalcuiea, ADHD, ASD, SPD etc. Even allowing for overlapping disabilities in the same students, the number of kids in the average classrooms with learning disabilities starts to approach 30%. Yet nation wide the average number of kids in special education is 13-15%. And that number includes kids with medical or emotional disabilities too.
So, we are failing to "Child Find" and intervene with a significant number of kids with learning differences. Then when we do intervene, districts often do not have staff trained in this kind of literacy education. Nor do they possess the appropriate curriculum for a child with literacy challenges. So they try whatever they have and kids struggle and you wind up with a bunch of middle schoolers who don't have the foundation that they need.
You are absolutely right that a kid who is struggling with basic reading skills does not have the working memory to spare for actual analysis of the material. But that is what you average middle school teacher is interested in teaching. It's what we would want our kids to be doing at that stage. And, it attracts teachers who are interested in that kind of teaching.
On the other hand, teaching a child how to read is a meticulous, slow, step by step process. It is a different skill set and attracts a different kind of teacher. This is especially true for kids who are challenged by the task.
I believe the solutions are two fold. First, the federal mandate to "Child Find" needs to be given teeth. It should require screening of ALL school children for a full range of learning disabilities from a young age. Finland has one of the highest literacy rates in the world for their students. All children in Finland "qualify for" and receive, special education type interventions from pre-school onward. Thus, step one is to accurately identify kids with learning disabilities EARLY. And to then use evidenced based intervention, EARLY.
The second component is massive investment in teacher education. Provide scholarships and tuition reimbursement. Push the profession to a masters degree and put an emphasis on research so that all teachers are continually learning about how the developing human brain learns. We can pay for this by eliminating the billions we spend on problematic standardized testing. Clearly they are a failed experiment.
Echo reading (where every student follows a copy of the text, and together, echo back the reading of the teacher), helps readers to comprehend, through accurate pronunciation and use of expression and tone, as well as to become more fluent as new vocabulary becomes less of an obstacle.
Kids in 4th through 12th grade need to read a lot to get their skills where they need to be. Rather than bemoan their skills, there is a really neat and amazingly simple solution. What if we could get EVERY student to read for 5 to 7 hours a day, seven days a week? And where they would WANT to do this. In fact, object strenuously if NOT permitted to do so? What if this magical reading process offers pronunciation and context help every minute? Students who use this method read more than 300 pages a day. Every day. Whether at home or on the go? Using their phone, tablet, laptop, or just home TV/streaming. What if research shows this can double their chances of becoming a better, stronger reader? would teachers endorse it? You would think so, but the objections are often strenuous and almost viscerally so. BUT this works. and its totally free. Millions of teens use it, buit tens of millions more don’t. They should. Everyone should.
Thank you for your post. I will humbly offer a comment.
It's a difficult issue for sure. By the time these students get to the upper elementary and middle school grades it's supremely challenging for them to catch up, and it seems that it's a near impossible task. I propose that the sweet spot of a solution ideally lies in K-3, and that the approach must include both direct instruction and support on the fundamentals within a love-of-reading type environment. Students have to fall in love with story and interesting information to want to practice with the kind of energy and commitment required to get good at reading. In my experience, 4th and 5th grades should be reading 40-50 novels at their level, and many more if they are below grade level and the books are shorter and simpler. All of this to say that if a student lacks that sort of love and momentum by the time they enter middle school, it's supremely challenging to ignite or re-ignite. In conclusion, the programs for phonics and the fundamentals are critical, but at the same time, a love for building a reading life that spills over into recess and afterschool and weekends and community libraries is crucial. It's the only way I've seen struggling readers shed their willful non-learner attitude.
Again, thank you for the post. And thank you to everyone who contributed to the comments.
Totally agree with this post - the education pendulum swings back and forward much too far… At present - it seems the ONLY focus is on phonics & I agree that other important components of reading (like fluency, vocab & comprehension) have been relegated into the background!
Maybe the answer is more about what research has always said - that we need to teach systematically & explicitly ALL reading components if we want to empower readers!
Pity that we seem to repeat past errors and NOT learn from our reading history?
Surprising stats. I volunteer for an organization in Austin, Texas that matches Literacy Partners with 1st through 3rd graders to read together weekly. Their mission is to see all children reading on level at third grade. Because until 3rd grade, children learn to read. After third grade, they read to learn. Maybe more of these programs would help. Doing my part.
I wished that i had a sort of a symbolism dictionary at school as didn't understand the symbolisms probably due to growing in a different cultural context (like, i mostly watched foreign tv and read books by foreign authors instead of local ones).
I lacked a lot of the cultural context to understand the symbolisms or references.
Not to mention that a lot of literature that we read in school was about village life. We as city kids didn't know what a lot of the words meant, like we had no clue about the names of the tools, what they looked like or what they were used for. And those books tended to use archaic language.
I remember we had a text comprehension test. And out of the 50 words of the text, i knew the meaning of less than 5 words.
I agree with the writing aspect and your points about it including syntax construction. I feel like reading itself should be a class and in line with your point about short-term to long-term, I'm sure allowing naps in the class would be good for younger kids. It does surprise me that kids are on the internet their whole lives and the written aspect of it is rather paramount to using it yet the reading scores are down.
Thank you for sharing this information, Natalie. It’s crucial for all stakeholders to understand the many other skills (beyond fluent decoding) students need in order to comprehend.
This data about upper elementary/middle school teachers’ discomfort in helping students with comprehension should shock us.
Do you have access to which teacher-training programs (which colleges/universities) offer future educators more than a cursory course in how to teach comprehension strategies?
"Even if students have gotten adequate instruction in decoding simple words in the early grades, they may still be stymied by the multi-syllabic words they encounter at higher grade levels."
I highly recommend the free online program Word Connections:
"There is evidence that the 40-lesson Word Connections program improves reading outcomes for upper elementary students. Specifically, we have tested the program with third to fifth grade students identified as with or at-risk for reading disability. To date, our team has conducted three empirical studies reporting positive effects from this program. Students who participated in the intervention showed greater gains in word reading and decoding, reading comprehension, spelling, and accurate reading of both isolated affixes and multisyllabic words.
When I taught in a specialist SEMH setting. We would always have captions on YouTube videos or films if we were using them during lessons or in down-time.
When I taught 8th grade, I had about 30% of my students reading 4th grade level and lower and about 20% of my students reading at a college level. I remember the stark realization that my reading material and curriculum was designed for only 50% of my class and worked so hard that year to bring in differentiated content that I often had to make up on my own to better fit the interests and developmental levels of my students who deserved content rich material. Good news is that the results were positive for students in terms of their growth in reading competence and confidence. Bad news is that it was exhausting, lonely work. I am so glad there are more resources now and to see in this post that there's more attention being given to the need for higher quality, age-appropriate reading skills materials for the higher grade levels.
Thank you for the work you did, it matters. I wish teachers were celebrated, respected, and compensated more. Why teachers aren’t seen as the noblest humans with the most awe-inspiring job to have, is lost on me ✨👏🏼💕
Readers' Theater is a great technique! I used it a lot with my high school English students before I retired. I would give them an overview of what we were going to read for the day without providing any spoilers. Then I would read the exposition and let students volunteer for which character they wanted to read aloud. The more adept readers would usually volunteer for the longer parts and the struggling readers usually wouldn't volunteer but would read aloud if I promised them that it was a small part (they still had to pay attention to know when to come in.) I intentionally picked literary works with enriched content but which had a fair amount of dialogue. Plays of course were especially great for this but novels and short stories could also work well.
I might comment on difficult or puzzling portions of the text as we read along or I could stop if a student had a question. It also gave me a chance to talk about words that didn't make sense phonetically like the word "indict" or the word "row" which has a different pronunciation depending on the meaning.
I sometimes had administrators question whether or not this was an effective use of class time. But one year they had us study the current brain research, which advocated this technique, especially because hearing all the different voices keeps the brain engaged. That gave me a little more cred.
I might add that Readers' Theater is not the same as having all the students as a group reading aloud one line or one sentence at a time, which is demonstrably not an effective technique.
I can't believe experts in the K-12 education system still haven't figured out what's wrong after 50 yrs. of abject failure. Here's a hint: Concluding that test scores are lower, which they've been saying for decades, means test scores were once higher.
So, where's the most logical place to start? What has to be step one? As you abandon the notion that new is better (new is just new) and become willing to trade all those different programs and online nonsense for something really simple, go back to when scores were higher --- prior to post-1970 reforms that have failed miserably --- and examine and evaluate the curriculum, starting with K-6, from the perspective that children under six learn best through play, and the ability for all children to learn improves with play.
Knowing that, what can you do today that will improve life and learning for K-6 kids right away by giving them that time to play and just be kids? STOP WITH THE HOMEWORK ALREADY. I had a far superior K-6 education without an ounce of homework. My ability to write and comprehend complex sentences is exceptional, but it didn't happen through osmosis nor did it happen all at once or by the time I graduated from HS or even college. It's the result of the 1950s structured classroom and curriculum sans technical devices that gave me such a solid foundation that I was able to constantly improve.
Get rid of all technology for K-6. It's a waste of time (and $) for them and does nothing for social skills and class participation.
The article mentions difficulty with complex sentences. There is a method from that curriculum that not only teaches sentence structure, but my research, such as it is, has found it does far more for students in the way it aids both comprehension and cognitive development. There's more to say about that, but, essentially, one's ability to think can be no better than one's mastery of language.
Those standardized tests are all about reading comprehension. Even some of the math questions are word problems. There's absolutely no reason our kids can't do well on those tests. And you won't need to be concerned with performance in the upper grades so long as teachers are willing to correct their writing. Self-esteem is born of self-respect which comes from accomplishment, from doing one's best, so self-esteem isn't hurt by correcting their writing and expecting their best.
That'll be $100K. Send the check to . . . : - )
Twenty percent of all kids have dyslexia. 4-8% of students have dysgraphia. (probably an underestimate) Then we have dyscalcuiea, ADHD, ASD, SPD etc. Even allowing for overlapping disabilities in the same students, the number of kids in the average classrooms with learning disabilities starts to approach 30%. Yet nation wide the average number of kids in special education is 13-15%. And that number includes kids with medical or emotional disabilities too.
So, we are failing to "Child Find" and intervene with a significant number of kids with learning differences. Then when we do intervene, districts often do not have staff trained in this kind of literacy education. Nor do they possess the appropriate curriculum for a child with literacy challenges. So they try whatever they have and kids struggle and you wind up with a bunch of middle schoolers who don't have the foundation that they need.
You are absolutely right that a kid who is struggling with basic reading skills does not have the working memory to spare for actual analysis of the material. But that is what you average middle school teacher is interested in teaching. It's what we would want our kids to be doing at that stage. And, it attracts teachers who are interested in that kind of teaching.
On the other hand, teaching a child how to read is a meticulous, slow, step by step process. It is a different skill set and attracts a different kind of teacher. This is especially true for kids who are challenged by the task.
I believe the solutions are two fold. First, the federal mandate to "Child Find" needs to be given teeth. It should require screening of ALL school children for a full range of learning disabilities from a young age. Finland has one of the highest literacy rates in the world for their students. All children in Finland "qualify for" and receive, special education type interventions from pre-school onward. Thus, step one is to accurately identify kids with learning disabilities EARLY. And to then use evidenced based intervention, EARLY.
The second component is massive investment in teacher education. Provide scholarships and tuition reimbursement. Push the profession to a masters degree and put an emphasis on research so that all teachers are continually learning about how the developing human brain learns. We can pay for this by eliminating the billions we spend on problematic standardized testing. Clearly they are a failed experiment.
Echo reading (where every student follows a copy of the text, and together, echo back the reading of the teacher), helps readers to comprehend, through accurate pronunciation and use of expression and tone, as well as to become more fluent as new vocabulary becomes less of an obstacle.
Kids in 4th through 12th grade need to read a lot to get their skills where they need to be. Rather than bemoan their skills, there is a really neat and amazingly simple solution. What if we could get EVERY student to read for 5 to 7 hours a day, seven days a week? And where they would WANT to do this. In fact, object strenuously if NOT permitted to do so? What if this magical reading process offers pronunciation and context help every minute? Students who use this method read more than 300 pages a day. Every day. Whether at home or on the go? Using their phone, tablet, laptop, or just home TV/streaming. What if research shows this can double their chances of becoming a better, stronger reader? would teachers endorse it? You would think so, but the objections are often strenuous and almost viscerally so. BUT this works. and its totally free. Millions of teens use it, buit tens of millions more don’t. They should. Everyone should.
www.captionson.org
or us.turnonthesubtitles.org
Leib Lurie,
TOTS USA
Thank you for your post. I will humbly offer a comment.
It's a difficult issue for sure. By the time these students get to the upper elementary and middle school grades it's supremely challenging for them to catch up, and it seems that it's a near impossible task. I propose that the sweet spot of a solution ideally lies in K-3, and that the approach must include both direct instruction and support on the fundamentals within a love-of-reading type environment. Students have to fall in love with story and interesting information to want to practice with the kind of energy and commitment required to get good at reading. In my experience, 4th and 5th grades should be reading 40-50 novels at their level, and many more if they are below grade level and the books are shorter and simpler. All of this to say that if a student lacks that sort of love and momentum by the time they enter middle school, it's supremely challenging to ignite or re-ignite. In conclusion, the programs for phonics and the fundamentals are critical, but at the same time, a love for building a reading life that spills over into recess and afterschool and weekends and community libraries is crucial. It's the only way I've seen struggling readers shed their willful non-learner attitude.
Again, thank you for the post. And thank you to everyone who contributed to the comments.
Totally agree with this post - the education pendulum swings back and forward much too far… At present - it seems the ONLY focus is on phonics & I agree that other important components of reading (like fluency, vocab & comprehension) have been relegated into the background!
Maybe the answer is more about what research has always said - that we need to teach systematically & explicitly ALL reading components if we want to empower readers!
Pity that we seem to repeat past errors and NOT learn from our reading history?
Good article. Poignantly written.
Surprising stats. I volunteer for an organization in Austin, Texas that matches Literacy Partners with 1st through 3rd graders to read together weekly. Their mission is to see all children reading on level at third grade. Because until 3rd grade, children learn to read. After third grade, they read to learn. Maybe more of these programs would help. Doing my part.
I wished that i had a sort of a symbolism dictionary at school as didn't understand the symbolisms probably due to growing in a different cultural context (like, i mostly watched foreign tv and read books by foreign authors instead of local ones).
I lacked a lot of the cultural context to understand the symbolisms or references.
Not to mention that a lot of literature that we read in school was about village life. We as city kids didn't know what a lot of the words meant, like we had no clue about the names of the tools, what they looked like or what they were used for. And those books tended to use archaic language.
I remember we had a text comprehension test. And out of the 50 words of the text, i knew the meaning of less than 5 words.
I agree with the writing aspect and your points about it including syntax construction. I feel like reading itself should be a class and in line with your point about short-term to long-term, I'm sure allowing naps in the class would be good for younger kids. It does surprise me that kids are on the internet their whole lives and the written aspect of it is rather paramount to using it yet the reading scores are down.
Thank you for sharing this information, Natalie. It’s crucial for all stakeholders to understand the many other skills (beyond fluent decoding) students need in order to comprehend.
This data about upper elementary/middle school teachers’ discomfort in helping students with comprehension should shock us.
Do you have access to which teacher-training programs (which colleges/universities) offer future educators more than a cursory course in how to teach comprehension strategies?
"Even if students have gotten adequate instruction in decoding simple words in the early grades, they may still be stymied by the multi-syllabic words they encounter at higher grade levels."
I highly recommend the free online program Word Connections:
https://www.jessicatoste.com/wordconnections
"There is evidence that the 40-lesson Word Connections program improves reading outcomes for upper elementary students. Specifically, we have tested the program with third to fifth grade students identified as with or at-risk for reading disability. To date, our team has conducted three empirical studies reporting positive effects from this program. Students who participated in the intervention showed greater gains in word reading and decoding, reading comprehension, spelling, and accurate reading of both isolated affixes and multisyllabic words.
One big sign your school doesn't take reading instruction seriously:
https://johnmayosmith.substack.com/p/1-big-sign-your-childs-school-doesnt
What should parents look out for in the 10th grade classroom?
When I taught in a specialist SEMH setting. We would always have captions on YouTube videos or films if we were using them during lessons or in down-time.