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Secondary Literacy Intervention: Successful Strategies for Closing the Literacy Gap

Adolescent learners who are not reading on grade level face significant challenges in their academic and personal lives. They are more likely to earn lower grades, feel frustration, and experience disengagement from school. Effective interventions can help these students catch up and improve their literacy and life outcomes. While there are many strategies and approaches, a few practices are especially critical for this population of learners.

Properly Assess Students Word Level Reading Skills

Educators, administrators, and curriculum decision makers often assume that by high school, students are able to decode and read words, and have been able to do so since elementary school. Thus, the emphasis in secondary literacy is most often on comprehension, analysis, and writing, without always taking the time to look more deeply at what these delayed readers need. It is true that most high school students look and behave like they are proficient word readers, but this is not the case. In 2021, the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that only 37% of high school seniors were proficient or advanced in reading, and data suggests that a large chunk of the below-proficient readers have word level reading challenges to some extent. Unfortunately, if students are struggling readers, they have years of experience coping and masking their challenges, thus their knowledge gaps can easily be overlooked. To avoid missing these critical gaps, it’s essential to check students’ actual phonemic awareness and decoding knowledge. We cannot create proficient readers without first assessing and addressing word reading.

• Use a screener that checks the student’s skills with both nonsense and real words. Non-proficient readers are often missed because they are reasonably good at storing words in sight word memory once they know them. While this is also a good skill, it can mask decoding deficits. Students need to be able to apply decoding principles to unfamiliar words, not just read words they have already encountered and memorized.    
• Use a screener that will help you uncover error patterns so that you know specifically where the decoding weaknesses are. Some students may have broad deficits, while others have specific gaps. 

Fix Decoding First

It can be frustrating to realize that a high school student has decoding deficits, but no one is likely more frustrated than the student themselves. They are late in their school career, and pressing comprehension and writing needs are at the forefront of the typical secondary curriculum. However, if teachers fall prey to the idea that they don’t have time to teach decoding, the student’s knowledge gap will increase and they will not be able to make progress in the other areas of reading. If you identify decoding deficits through screening, these deficits must be addressed with explicit instruction so that the student can read words. Everything else – vocabulary knowledge, comprehension, curricular standards, enjoyment of reading – all of these things hinge on making sure that the student has solid word reading skills. Unfortunately, there is no shortcut around this.

 

High schoolers are sometimes reluctant and embarrassed to have underlying reading deficits discovered, and can be stubborn about doing the work to correct it. It makes sense, as this often comes from years of not understanding what was going on in the classroom, accompanied by feelings of low self-esteem. Students find ways to cope. They tell themselves that reading doesn’t matter, or that they read “well enough,” or that they hate reading. Fortunately, those defense mechanisms typically fall away quickly once the student is receiving the right kind of instruction.

 

Proper phonemic and decoding instruction is: explicit, systematic, sequential, and preferably multisensory. All learners do well with this type of instruction, but children who struggled to learn to read during their elementary years absolutely require it in order to learn word reading. The good news is that while many students, even those in high school, will need you to start at the very beginning with short and long vowel sounds and progress through all of the phonemic and phonics concepts without skipping, students at this age often are quick learners. Some students may only require specific instruction in a more complex area of phonics, such as r-controlled, variant vowel, or multisyllabic words. If your data supports that they are fully proficient in some areas then you can begin instruction later in the sequence, but make sure that those more basic skills are fully secure before skipping them. The instructional process for these older students is like fixing potholes in a bumpy runway; as the “holes” are filled with new phonemic skills, more and more words are unlocked, confidence builds, and most learners “take off” with their new reading abilities, quickly appreciating the enormous impact that proper reading has on their entire academic life.

 

Choose High Interest … Everything

It’s common knowledge that educators need to choose high-interest books, stories, and non-fiction for older students. But that advice is not very specific, nor is it as expansive as it should be, and it’s often implemented in a way that is teacher-centric, rather than being student-centric.

Stories and Texts

Secondary struggling readers are usually quite far behind in many areas: content knowledge, vocabulary knowledge, genre knowledge, sentence structure and grammar, and the list goes on. So, it is okay and even preferable to have a goal of “hooking” them on reading and words, more so that getting them to appreciate the richness of literature, especially at first. You’ll find countless blog posts and curated lists directing you to wonderful books and stories like The Giver, by Lois Lowry, or Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank, or Thank you M’am, by Langston Hughes, and if those types of books work to hook your students, that’s wonderful, because they are critically acclaimed and regularly taught with good reason. You may, however, have more luck with thinking way outside of the box. Short stories and nonfiction pieces are often more digestible than novels, and offer plenty to work with when students don’t have the speed or stamina for books.

 

As noted before, secondary struggling readers often don’t like reading or anything associated with it. For them, reading is out of reach, not fun, and not something they want to spend any time on. As teachers we need to flip their entire paradigm, and that is not easy! Adding a bit of sugar to cough medicine may make it tolerable, but it's not something you seek out the way you would seek out a delicious homemade dessert. Our goal is to gain students’ interest so that they see that reading is more like that delicious dessert, rather than a medicine to be tolerated or avoided. These students have mature, complicated lives and interests and they will likely refuse to read anything that they deem childish, old-fashioned, or out of touch. Yes, it’s often their lack of exposure that makes them erroneously judge excellent, time-tested literature as irrelevant, but you are unlikely to convince them otherwise through forced reading. The good news is there is an almost infinite array of choices to grab them if you set aside your own ideas of what they “should be reading.” Look for stories with authentic, modern dialogue, where your students can see themselves in the pages or in the main characters – figuring out how to navigate high school romance and drama, make the competitive varsity team, deal with annoying parents, or cope with bullying, prejudice, or traumatic experiences.

 

Stories and texts that drew universal five-stars from students in one secondary literacy classroom last year included:

• “Strawberry Spring,” a short story by Stephen King (1978) from Night Shift
• "How to Transform an Everyday, Ordinary Hoop Court into a Place of Higher Learning and You at the Podium” by Matt de la Peña (2016), published in the anthology Flying Lesson and Other Stories
• “Eraser Tattoo” by Jason Reynolds
• “Bad Bunny’s Next Move” published in Time magazine, March 28, 2024, by Andrew R. Chow and Mariah Espada

 

This list is just an example of one way to be creative with your selections. This teacher knew that her students loved horror, romance (even if they pretended they didn’t), sports, and music, and leaned into works that she knew they would find edgy and authentic, and not feel like “this is good for you” (like medicine). Good teachers can always find new vocabulary, themes, authorial choice, and much more in any story or nonfiction chosen, so be extremely selective in choosing pieces that really meet your students wherever they are - especially if they are certain that “reading is boring.”

Words

Words are just as interesting as stories – and just as important. Words can take center stage in a high school classroom in many ways: puzzles, song lyrics, slang exploration, slam poetry, sentence examination, semantic gradients, words with multiple meanings, and much more. The word gap for struggling readers is significant. Experts estimate that typically developing readers know about 30,000 words in 7th grade and 40,000-50,000 words when they graduate high school (Graves, 2009). That word knowledge comes from breadth and depth of exposure; 12-20 exposures in varied and complex text is needed in order to master a word and truly grasp its meaning (Cardenas-Hagan, 2020). Below grade level readers who rarely read independently are encountering far fewer words, and less often. They also may miss a significant amount of classroom and textbook instruction due to their reading deficits. The outcome of this is cumulative, and means that they know a shocking 50-90% fewer words than on-grade-level peers by the time they reach high school. Teachers can make a high impact with these students by looking for constant, daily opportunities to expand word curiosity and word knowledge.

 

If you need to teach high school students basic phonics, you don’t need to do it with words like cat, pet, hen, and pest. High schoolers will be much happier working on a basic concept such as short vowel phonemes with words like: chat, quest, dwell, yelp, thatch, and heft, or on VCE phonemes with dedicate, antidote, ridicule, and obsolete. This carries through to all of the phonemic concepts - either curate the words you use carefully, choosing high interest, high value words or use a program like Really Great Reading’s HD Word that uses mature words like those above on day one of the curriculum, and moves learners into multisyllabic words within the first few lessons. Do not rely on the words that are regularly used to teach the same concepts to elementary learners.

Classroom & Materials

Much has been made of setting up classrooms with rich libraries, comfy seating, and cozy lighting. Beyond that, adolescent learners want to have agency and community. If your classroom is prepared with tables for group work and lively discussion, materials they can access without your permission such as headphones for audio books, and white boards and markers for syllable and morpheme work, and changing visuals that engage conversation, your students will be more likely to want to be in the room...and learn there. To the greatest extent you can, make your room a place where adolescents want to hang out and feel ownership.

Lessons & Activities

A tendency that secondary teachers of striving readers may have is to slow down. After all, if students are behind they often need extra time, extra instruction, and lots of repetition. While slowing the pace makes sense, it’s also true that students' attention spans are shorter than ever. The more we can teach at a quick pace, the more we can hold their attention. You can serve both goals if you teach at a fast pace, and then revisit concepts through regular repetition and practice.  One consistently successful way to do this is to gamify anything you can; high schoolers almost universally love games, and they usually enjoy competition as well. Some examples of games include:

• Daily teacher-created Wordle-style games following your phonics instruction
• Word guessing games for taught vocabulary & morphemes
• Elimination games for anything you have asked your students to memorize
• “Rewrite the ending” competitions following stories
• Readers theaters where students do laptop set design, sound and effects, editing and more, drawing on their tech savvy skills and vote for and win “Oscars” in various categories
• Word detective trivia contests
• Escape room style games where students solve clues related to phonics, vocabulary, morphemes, sentences, and more to unlock the room 

Teach Morphemes

Morphemes are usually taught in elementary school, but if your students were lagging behind, they may have missed or forgotten most or all of that instruction. Unless learners were regularly encountering new words or new word parts, they probably didn’t internalize or commit to memory any morphemes they learned the way that “good” and regular readers would have. However, high school is so content-rich across subject areas that the timing is ideal for teaching (or re-teaching) morphemes. And, morphemes are a much more efficient way to teach vocabulary. With morphemes, students have access to exponentially more words and ideas than they do learning vocabulary words one at time, so this is an excellent way to combat the enormous word gap that exists for most below level readers. One study estimated that knowledge of just 20 prefixes and 14 bases (roots) unlocks the meaning of over 100,000 words (Gruber 1986).  Consider teaching the 100 most common morphemes sequentially as part of your regular curriculum. Just like students need to understand that a phoneme is the smallest unit of speech, they should understand that a morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning, and be able to use learned morphemic knowledge to better understand content across settings.

 

One effective strategy is to reach out to your Math, social studies, and science teaching peers (feel free to include other disciplines as well), and ask them for words or word banks, or even key curricular material they want students to be able to access. Then, use those expectations to inform your morphological study with your students.

Maximize Teacher:Student Instruction & Engagement

The market is full with scripted programs, many of them online. Often though, struggling secondary students have such individual needs that the programs aren’t as well-targeted to them as traditional teacher student 1:1, small group, or whole group work. As exceptional as many programs are, and they certainly have an important place in a literacy classroom, teachers have the ability to be responsive in a much more nuanced way when providing direct instruction. For example, if students sort words based on phonics patterns with you, or follow and copy your annotations while you demonstrate using a document camera, or share their thoughts and questions during a shared oral story, you can engage with them in the moment to make sure they are understanding what they are supposed to be learning.

 

Teacher:student interaction lends itself to getting students off of screens for at least part of their day. We now know that handwriting which has been largely forgotten in school is directly tied to reading. Writing for this population shouldn’t be primarily about essay composition, but rather about stamina, expression of ideas, spelling, and grammar. You can offer writing work in very small (sentence-level) chunks and give immediate corrective feedback.

 

Anything out loud is excellent. You can model fluency and prosody with students during choral reading or reader’s theater activities. When you choose to read a story or text orally with students it can be one that is more challenging or a higher Lexile level, because they can usually orally comprehend at a higher level than they can read, and you will be right there to check their understanding as you read.

Make Authentic Student Connections

Before any of the strategies above can be offered or accessed, teachers have to create a safe space for students to take chances and attempt the interventions. Students need to understand and believe that their reading needs are not their fault. You, as the teacher, hopefully recognize yourself that the student is not to blame for their current skill level, and also believe that they can make progress. Students will borrow your faith and confidence in them if they see and sense it.

 

Teachers can provide data to students early in the school year, showing the gaps in literacy across all types of students (and adults!) in order to disprove the notion that delayed readers are not smart. Those of us who study how the brain learns to read know that reading is exceptionally complex, that schools have not always used the best strategies to teach it, and that reading acquisition is not related to intelligence. Normalizing reading struggles goes a long way to helping students set aside any defensive posturing they might have understandably developed.

 

Teaching secondary students who need to improve in reading is challenging, but it is also incredibly rewarding. Despite the sweat and tears of both teachers and students, It’s hard to think of a place in education where the work is more recognizably impactful right in front of your eyes.

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