We have older students who struggle with reading throughout the country

We have older students who struggle with reading throughout the country.  There are many reasons why they are having trouble.  Testing will often show these students have a low vocabulary and poor comprehension skills.  The obvious solution is to create programs to improve vocabulary and enhance comprehension skills.  We now have on the market intervention programs that are phenomenal at addressing these weaknesses.  But, what if the scores were incorrect?

 

I began working with several older students who were reading far below grade level.  However, their oral language was age appropriate.  When talking with them, you would not know they had an issue with reading.  They also did not have an issue with comprehending what was said.  There was a huge gap between their oral vocabulary and their reading vocabulary.  The issue was that the gap actually represented the large number of words the students used but could not recognize in text.  Failure to recognize known words in text interferes with fluency and directly impacts comprehension.

I asked several teachers to have some of their struggling readers, who had good oral language,  read grade level passages.  The teachers recorded the words students skipped, guessed, mumbled or miscalled.  One week later, the students were asked to define those words.  They defined over 90% of the words they could not read.

The solution now seems simple.  These students cannot decode and need phonics.  These are also the same students who have been put through the “phonics” programs over and over.  They will tell you that phonics does not work.  The issue here is we went back too far in the phonics instruction.  They know the letter names and they know the sounds they make.  What they do not understand is how to quickly recognize the letters that combine to make the sounds they know.  They need advanced decoding.  Until they are taught this skill, they will not recognize words they know in text. 

As reading teachers, we need to continue to seek out the answer to:  Why do most readers internalize advanced decoding and others require direct explicit instruction in order to learn the skill? In the meantime, we need to explicitly teach these students advanced decoding.