By middle school, students need more than 'the cat sat on the mat'

More than a quarter of middle and high school students struggle with basic reading, say a majority of educators in an Education Week survey. It doesn't just show up in English class. They have trouble with words such as "photosynthesis" in science, "polynomial" in math or "constitution" in social studies.

Lack of motivation was the most common reason for poor reading schools, according to the teachers and principals surveyed. "Limited fluency" was in second place.

"Forty states have passed laws to align reading instruction with research," writes Stephen Sawchuk. But few look beyond the early grades.

Teachers in middle and high school rarely are trained to teach foundational reading skills, and their schools may not offer intensive help to students who read poorly.

Structured literacy classes are helping middle schoolers learn foundational skills at Bow Memorial School in New Hampshire, reports Sarah Schwartz in Education Week.

After school closures, reading specialist Loralyn LaBombard saw more students who struggled to decode words more complicated than "cat." Now students "learn how to break down complex, multisyllabic words, improve their spelling, and practice reading fluently — all while also digging into novels and other whole books," Schwartz writes.

Instruction is explicit and systematic.

. . . in the 8th grade class, (Kerri) Harris was introducing a new set of suffixes — appendages like “-less” and “-est”— to her group of eight students. Learning how to identify word parts like these, and understanding how they modify bases, can help students more easily decode and understand new multisyllabic words while reading. Later, she would connect this lesson in morphology and multisyllabic decoding to the young adult novel that students were reading as a class.

It's important for students to practice multisyllabic word-reading by reading literature, said LaBombard in an interview. They need to see the connections.

A third of fourth-graders score "below basic" on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading test, Schwartz notes. Students who've fallen behind usually stay behind.

Studies show that middle-grades students who score below the “decoding threshold" -- the ability to sound out words -- get little benefit from lessons focused on reading comprehension, she writes. First, they need to learn to read the words.