How to help highschoolers who can’t read words
The big picture:
Far too many students start high school without basic word-reading skills. In learning plans, schools make helpful adjustments and accommodations to compensate. But a better long-term strategy is to teach struggling students to read words.
Why it matters:
Failure to learn basic reading skills by high school:
- leads to lower reading comprehension across the curriculum; and
- often has seriously negative knock-on effects for academic success, later employment, and health outcomes.
What helps:
- Evidence-informed interventions consistent with the Simple View of Reading or the Cognitive Foundations Framework.
- A cumulative, systematic sequence.
- Programs that include early, intermediate, and advanced skills and meet students where they are.
- Explicit and direct teaching with corrective feedback.
- High intensity instruction with a brisk (but not overwhelming) pace.
- Lots of opportunities to review and revise concepts.
- Interleaved (distributed) practice of new and review concepts.
- Age-appropriate materials that, ideally, support Australian spelling conventions and pronunciations.
Examples of programs:
- Toe-by-Toe/Stride Ahead/Stareway to Spelling
- MacqLit
- Barton Reading and Spelling System
- SPELD-SA Intensive Literacy Program
- Spelling Mastery
- Spell@SPELD NSW
- Word Wasp
- Word Connections
- UFLI Foundations (requires modification)
- Sounds~Write (requires modification)
More information:
- From the Australian Education Research Organisation:
- From us:
More practice:
Whatever program(s) you use, struggling high school students need lots of additional and distributed opportunities to practice and revise concepts.
To increase opportunities for older students to practice and succeed with basic, intermediate and advanced word-reading skills, we’ve written a sequence of workbooks, each targeting a specific set of skills, to supplement your core reading program(s).
Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.
Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language
Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.
