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Published: 13 November 2025

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Early identification and intervention

Learning to read is the most important outcome of a child’s primary school education. If a child does not learn to read in primary school, then they will not be able to use reading to access the curriculum in secondary and tertiary education. High levels of literacy promote human capital accumulation, thus promoting income, employment, health benefits, and social participation for individuals, and poverty reduction and economic development for societies. Failure to develop basic reading skills by age nine predicts a lifetime of illiteracy.

If a student is two years behind his peers he must develop in reading at a rate twice as fast as they do, if he is to catch them by the end of primary school (as they will improve by at least two years over that period). While this conception of reading progress is rather crude it does give the flavour of just how immense a task it is. It also helps explain the chilling finding from a Melbourne University study (Hill, 1995), that for most students in this position there is no discernible improvement in reading between Year Four and Year Ten. Most students do not have access to intervention, and their prognosis is grim. For those students who do receive help it is incumbent upon us to provide the best and most efficient intervention available at the time. This implies that the most salient content must be delivered to students in the most effective manner possible.

Unless these children receive the appropriate instruction, over 70 percent of the children entering first grade who are at risk for reading failure will continue to have reading problems into adulthood. On the other hand, the early identification of children at-risk for reading failure coupled with the provision of comprehensive early reading interventions can reduce the percentage of children reading below the basic level in the fourth grade (e.g., 38 percent) to six percent or less. students who fail to achieve basic reading proficiency often exhibit increased behavioural effects, decreased teacher-student engagement quality, reduced student persistence, and postsecondary 3 goal attainment (Kieffer & Vukovic, 2013; Peng et al., 2019).

Because teachers’ perceptions of students with behavioural difficulties correlate with teacher-student interaction and engagement quality, additional research is needed to further investigate teachers’ perceptions, classroom behaviours, and the quality of teacher engagement with struggling readers that could increase effectiveness, foundational reading proficiency, and the identification of early-grade struggling readers, (Hernandez et al., 2018). Therefore, when  teachers identify students exhibiting persistent reading problems, interventionists and reading specialists can collectively work to reduce student reading gaps and help these students develop along desired reading continuums (Allen & Loven, 2022). If this issue remains unresolved, struggling readers’ educational achievement will continually erode, because students lack essential, foundational reading comprehension abilities (Capin et al., 2021).

Teachers are critical in identifying struggling readers, because they first observe signs of reading difficulties (Virinkoski et al., 2018). Many educators report, however, that their teacher training programs lack relevant training regarding identification of students with varying learning difficulties (Jones et al., 2019). Additionally, recent 5 observation studies have discovered that teachers’ whole group instruction methods have become increasingly inadequate in addressing the unique needs of struggling readers (Folsom et al., 2019). Students with persistent reading difficulties benefit from methodical, purposeful, and progressive reading instruction that provides continuous teacher-student feedback, involvement, and engagement (Allen & Loven, 2022).

Addressing reading failure at the secondary level 

Nationally, more than 30% of Australian children entering high school – mainly in government and Catholic schools – cannot read or write properly. (Australian Council for Educational Research date?). Many older children have experienced the debilitating sequence of interacting skill deficits described by Stanovich (1986) as the Matthew effect. For example, the early lack of phonemic awareness leads to a failure to master the alphabetic principle. This further entails slow, error-prone decoding, the overuse of contextual cues, and poor comprehension. This resultant laborious, unsatisfying reading style leads students to avoid text, with a consequential reduction in vocabulary growth, and a broadening of the skill deficit. Much evidence has now accumulated to indicate that reading itself is a moderately powerful determinant of vocabulary growth, verbal intelligence, and general comprehension ability (Stanovich, 1993).

Content: It has long been assumed that once a student is past the primary grades, phonological processing is no longer critical to word identification and to reading. Across the life span, from childhood to adolescence, decoding words reflects primarily, phonological, rather than orthographic coding. Such findings are consonant with what is becoming overwhelming evidence that phonological mechanisms mediate word identification in all readers, whether beginners or experienced readers (Shaywitz et al., 1999).

Many students who have relied upon whole-word memory recognition as their mode for storage and retrieval find the strategy collapses in Year Four. Whereas a word recognition capacity of 400 words is adequate for coping with text up to this time (and many children’s visual memory can manage such a load), the demand increases dramatically to about 4000 words around that year, and up to 7000 words by Year Six (Carnine, 1982), what Share (1995) describes as an “orthographic avalanche” (p.17).

For the student who relies primarily on word shape, the task is similar to that required in visually memorizing 7000 telephone numbers. In those languages that do rely on images rather than an alphabet for their construction, the number of words that are typically employed in print is far less than in English. For example, Chinese adults are said to have a working familiarity with only about 4000-5000 (Adams, 1990). Students who cannot access the phonological route to identify the escalating array of new words obviously struggle, and progress grinds to a halt. In truth, they had difficulties before this time, but perhaps managed to disguise them in classrooms where careful continuous assessment of word attack skills was unavailable.

Should we be focussing on decoding or comprehension? It is true that most reading problems can be traced back to problems of “getting the word off the page” rapidly and effortlessly; however, there are students whose general language development (in addition to their decoding) is also delayed. In 90% of cases, the source of reading comprehension problems is poor word recognition skills (Oakhill & Garnham, 1988).

Effective intervention: The specific decoding tendencies of the problem reader suggest what a program must do to be effective in changing this student's behaviour.

• The problem reader makes frequent word identification errors.
• The student makes a higher percentage of mistakes when reading connected sentences than when reading words in word lists.
• Often the student reads words correctly in word lists and misidentifies the same words when they are embedded in connected sentences.
• The specific mistakes the reader makes include word omissions, word addition, confusion of high frequency words (such as what and that, of and for, and and the).
• The student also reads synonyms (saying pretty for beautiful).
• The student often guesses at words, basing the guess on the word-beginning or ending. And the student is consistently inconsistent, making a mistake on one word in a sentence and then making a different mistake when re-reading the sentence.
• The student doesn't seem to understand the relationship between the arrangement of letters in a word and the pronunciation of the word.
• Often the student is confused about the "word meaning" (a fact suggested by "synonym reading," "opposite reading," and word guessing). The strategy seems to be based on rules the student has been taught.
• The problem reader follows such advice as: Look at the beginning of the word and take a guess; Think of what the word might mean, and Look at the general shape of the word. The result is a complicated strategy that is often backwards: The student seems to think that to read a word one must first understand the word, then select the spoken word that corresponds to that understanding.
• Although the problem reader may use a strategy that is meaning based, the reader is often pre-empted from comprehending passages. The reason is that the student doesn't read a passage with the degree of accuracy needed to understand what the passage actually says. (Omitting the word not from one sentence changes the meaning dramatically.)
• The student's reading rate is often inadequate, making it difficult for the student to remember the various details of the passage, even if they were decoded accurately.

Often the problem reader doesn't have an effective reading strategy.

• The learner must learn to look at the order of letters in a word and learn that this order suggests the general pronunciation of the word. Furthermore, the student must learn that the game is simple: First figure out how the letters suggest one should say the word. Then see if the word you say is one that you recognize, one that has meaning. (Note that this strategy is basically the opposite of the one the typical problem reader uses.)
• The problem reader must receive practice in reading connected sentences that are composed of words that have been taught in isolation. Merely because the student reads words in lists does not imply transfer to written sentences.
• The student must receive strong reinforcement for working on reading because the task is very difficult and frustrating for the student. The student has received a great deal of evidence that reading is a puzzle that can't seem to be solved.
• Finally, the student must receive practice in reading a variety of passages. If the student practises reading only narrative passages, the student will not "automatically" transfer the reading skills to textbooks, articles, or other forms of expository writing. Therefore, different styles must be introduced.

The message in intervening effectively for older students is that it will take considerable time (perhaps a year or two) and the chosen intervention must be very effective and efficient to increase the students’ acceleration. It must be intensive – daily for about an hour. It must increase the students’ free reading so as to generalise their new skills to all their reading. It must include daily fluency activities - as fluency is the last feature of reading to improve.

If reading assistance fails to exert a significant impact on the reading performance of low-achieving older readers, one reason is that the instruction provided is not sufficiently intense. Extended practice is particularly important toward increasing the magnitude of treatment outcomes (Swanson, 2001). Lack of practice means fewer words can be read by sight, thereby restricting automaticity. The continued expenditure of cognitive attention on decoding leaves few resources available for comprehension, and so the student’s difficulties are compounded. The longer this set of circumstances prevails, the further delayed the student becomes, the more pervasive becomes the problem, and the more difficult the rescue operation

Usually these students have other deficits too – in numeracy, writing, thinking, content knowledge, problem solving. Unfortunately attempts to address all these difficulties together lead to a diluted curriculum in which no discernible progress occurs in any area. It is more effective to focus on the pivotal area of reading.

Conclusion 

Learning to read can, thus, be described as a fundamental skill which enables not only active participation in the curriculum but also forms the basis for lifelong success and opportunity (Hulme & Snowling, 2011). Evidence suggests that if learners have not reached expected levels of proficiency in ‘learning to read’ strategies in the early years of schooling, there will be little to no improvement in reading ability without intervention/remediation.

(Bigozzi et al. 2017; Pretorius et al. 2016).
 

References 

Adams, M. J. 1990. Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Cambridge, MIT press.

Allen & Loven (2022).

Bigozzi, L., Tarchi, C., Vagnoli, L., Valente, E., & Pinto, G. (2017). Reading fluency as a predictor of school outcomes across grades 4-9.  Frontiers in Psychology, 8(2), 200.

Capin, P., Eunsoo, C., Miciak, J., Roberts, G., & Vaughn, S. (2021). Examining the reading and cognitive profiles of students with significant reading comprehension difficulties. Learning Disability Quarterly, 44(3), 183-196.   

Carnine, (1982)

Folsom, J. S., Reed, D. K., Aloe, A. M., & Schmitz, S. S. (2019). Defining summer gain among elementary students with or at risk of reading disabilities. Exceptional Children, 85(4), 413-431.

Hernandez et al., (2018)

Hill, P. (1995).

Hulme, C., and Snowling, M. J. (2011). Children’s reading comprehension difficulties: Nature, causes, and treatments. Curr. Direct. Psychol. Sci. 20, 139–142. doi: 10.1177/0963721411408673

Jones et al., (2019)

Kieffer & Vukovic, (2013)

Oakhill & Garnham, (1988)

Peng et al., (2019)

Pretorius et al. (2016)

Share (1995)

Shaywitz, S.E., Fletcher, J.M., Holahan, J.M., Shneider, A.E., Marchione, K.E., Stuebing, K.K., Francis, D.J., Pugh, K.R., & Shaywitz, B.A. (1999). Persistence of dyslexia: The Connecticut longitudinal study at adolescence. Pediatrics, 104, 1351-1339.

Stanovich, K.E. (1993). Does reading make you smarter? Literacy and the development of verbal intelligence. Advances in Child Development and Behaviour, 24, 133-180.

Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21(4), 360-497.

Swanson, H.L. (2001) Research on interventions for adolescents with learning disabilities: A meta-analysis of outcomes related to higher-order processing. The Elementary School Journal, 101, 331-348.

Virinkoski, R., Lerkkanen, M-K., Holopainen, L., Eklund, K., & Aro, M. (2018). Teachers’ ability to identify children at early risk for reading difficulties in grade 1. Early Childhood Education Journal,46(5), 497-509.

Now for some recent documents

"THE LINK BETWEEN POOR STUDENT READING PROFICIENCY AND COLLEGE AND CAREER READINESS" (2025)

Abstract

“The ability to read proficiently is a skill often considered necessary for the success of an individual while in school and after graduating from high school. Although reading proficiency plays a large role in an individual's success, many students in our nation’s schools struggle to read and comprehend the texts they are presented with in their academic courses. The purpose of this research study was to determine whether a link existed between the reading proficiency and college and career readiness of high school agriculture students. The study used a mixed methods approach that collected both qualitative and quantitative data to answer the research questions guiding it. Qualitative data was collected using a focus group consisting of teachers employed within the Career, Technology, and Agriculture Education (CTAE) Department of the school being studied. The data collected showed the participating teachers use a variety of strategies in their classrooms including paired reading, speech to text, closed captioning on videos, graphic organizers, and other methods to help meet the needs of struggling readers. Quantitative data was analyzed through the use of statistical analysis to determine whether a correlation exists between student Agriculture End of Pathway Assessment (EOPA) scores and their corresponding Lexile levels. The results of the statistical analysis revealed that a moderately positive correlation does exist between the two variables being studied, indicating that the variables have an impact on one another. Based on the data gathered, a link does exist between the reading proficiency and college and career readiness of high school agriculture students.

Discussion: The data collected for this research study suggested that some high school agriculture students struggle to read proficiently, which can negatively impact their preparation for college and careers. There was a moderately positive correlation between Agriculture EOPA scores and Lexile levels that indicated these variables can impact one another. Further, in analyzing the 80 Agriculture EOPA scores and corresponding Lexile levels, it was found that students with lower Lexile levels did not perform as well on the Agriculture EOPA as students with higher Lexile levels. This suggested that there is a link between poor student reading proficiency and college and career readiness. Although many high school students struggle to read proficiently, there are instructional strategies available to help combat these issues. Various instructional strategies used in classrooms that are effective at helping to improve student reading proficiency and college and career readiness have been discussed. Many of these strategies have been corroborated by the teachers who participated in the focus group portion of this study as being used effectively in their own classrooms. This indicated that steps are being taken in the school being studied and in other schools across the county to help combat the issues outlined in this research study.”

Kirkland, James D. III, "THE LINK BETWEEN POOR STUDENT READING PROFICIENCY AND COLLEGE AND CAREER READINESS" (2025). Murray State Theses and Dissertations. 375.
https://digitalcommons.murraystate.edu/etd/375

Empowering Adolescent Readers: A Comprehensive Approach to Reading in Secondary Education (2025)

Adolescent literacy is a critical challenge for secondary education. Recent data from the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress reveal a troubling decline in Grade 8 reading proficiency, with only 31% of students scoring at or above proficiency levels. Addressing this issue is essential, yet existing interventions prove inadequate or impractical for implementation. This book proposes a comprehensive, multicomponent reading model designed for secondary students. By synthesizing research on various components of reading instruction, including word and sentence-level analysis, background knowledge, and comprehension strategies, alongside motivational and self-efficacy elements, a practical framework is presented that secondary educators can integrate into their classrooms. This model prioritizes intentional, evidenced-based practices and aims to enhance reading proficiency through systematic instruction and targeted interventions. This secondary reading model moves beyond an additive approach to focus on developing skilled readers through deliberate instructional strategies that leverage writing, speaking, and listening. The proposed model offers a scalable solution for improving adolescent literacy.

Sentence analysis focuses on the ability to comprehend and extract meaning from sentences and see the connections between sentences. Secondary textbooks and articles often contain very complex sentences with complex syntax that make comprehending at the sentence level critical to understanding longer texts. To gain knowledge from texts, readers 7 connect ideas within sentences and across sentences. Sentence-level comprehension is often overlooked and can prove to be a great scaffold to understanding longer complex texts.

Ortega, S. D. (2025). Empowering Adolescent Readers: A Comprehensive Approach to Reading in Secondary Education (Doctoral dissertation, San Diego State University).

Barricades to Reading Expertise among Students of Secondary High School of Bangladesh: Major Challenges and Insights (2025)

In recent decades, improvement in reading skills has been one of the main areas of interest. Due to ever increasing demand for reading in every aspect of our lives, it is essential to find new methods or techniques to improve students’ reading skills. Effective reading strategies are essential for the improvement of reading skills and they should be promoted in English language teaching. At the same time, conscious use of some specific strategies is required in particular reading contexts. In Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR), students' active participation is focused on aiming to improve their skills in reading an English text (Anwar, 2020). Through this method that allows students to work in groups, EFL learners can improve their reading ents need motivation, concentration, and interest in learning to attain improvement in reading skills.

Based on the CSR model, a three-stage teaching method consisting of individual reading, group discussion, and collaborative reflection has been implemented among Chinese first-year college students. This method has been, further, evaluated and the researchers, Jin and Lei, (2020) discussed its limitations and possible solutions which will help the students achieve better reading skills. According to Haerazi and Irawan, (2020) EFL learners face problems not only with reading skills but also with internal factors such as motivation for reading and self-efficacy. These external factors can influence students' reading abilities in the class.

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Improvement of Reading skill by Practising in a Team (2025)

One of the best ways to help students get better at reading is to have them practice reading books in small groups. Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) is a strategy to improve students' reading skills by working in a group. This strategy includes previewing the text, clicking and clunking, getting the gist, and wrapping up. According to Anwar, (2020) based on an interview with the English teacher in SMP 1 Jogoroto in Jombang, East Java, it was found that many students still had problems with reading. When the teacher asked the students to read the English text, they seemed to be less motivated while some other students were found to have a lack of vocabulary. As a research technique, the author used Quasi quasi experimental design which includes Pre-test and Post test. The study shows the result that post-test scores are better than their pretest scores. It can be seen from their mean scores of pretest and post-test. The pretest scores of the students were 58,6 which is different after the implementation of the CSR technique the post-test scores were 81,58 which means the CSR technique is very effective on the students’ ability to read English text (Anwar, 2020). skills and enhance their conceptual learning.”

Banu, A. R., Srabonty, S. N., Islam, M., Tisha, A. P., & Islam, U. S. (2025). Barricades to reading expertise among students of secondary high school of Bangladesh: Major challenges and insights. Asian Journal of Social Sciences and Legal Studies, 7(2), 308-315.

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Responsible reading: Children’s literature and social justice (2020)

“In high accountability cultures, primary phase literacy education tends to focus on improving children’s test scores. Driven by each country’s performance in international league tables, this results in narrow, predominantly skills-based programmes designed to address attainment gaps. While scores may have been enhanced in recent years, there is little evidence that policy directives have positioned literacy in the lives of learners in ways that have become meaningful for them or been transferred into ways of thinking that promote social equity. Indeed, teaching practices that exacerbate the challenges for those young people who are already disadvantaged by circumstance have become more prevalent. Teachers, therefore, have an ethical responsibility to redress this through their teaching. This paper argues that literature is core to more equitable literacy development. As not all reading practices are equal, developing literacy education for a more socially just society needs to challenge the dominant pedagogic hegemony. Literature has the potential to spark the kind of mindful disruption necessary to shift standardised paradigms of thought, so literacy education should have children’s literature at its heart.

By examining the value of literature through a set of complementary lenses, this paper seeks to reveal its affordances in young people’s lives. Then, through commentary taken from a pair of vignettes drawn from professional learning contexts, we illuminate shifts in teacher perception gained through scaffolded introduction to reading literary texts. The insights teachers gained reveal reconceptualisation of reading and the role of literature in primary education. This has the potential to redirect their future classroom practice. Consequently, we propose that for teachers to be adept at improving literacy outcomes through productive adoption and use of literary texts, they need: an aesthetic appreciation and knowledge of children’s literature; personal experience with reading such literature as social practice; and pedagogic insight into how to use literature to teach literacy and develop volitional readers. We call this knowledge set the additive trio, noting that no ‘step’ or understanding is sufficient on its own, and that together they can enable the development of Reading Teachers who work with literature to advance the social justice agenda.

Simpson, A., & Cremin, T. M. (2022). Responsible reading: Children’s literature and social justice. Education Sciences, 12(4), 264.

The older struggling reader (2001)

“What can be done? Plenty, if we are committed to applying best practices supported by reading research. Converging evidence from psychological studies of reading explains the nuts and bolts of learning to read at any age and in any alphabetic language ( Lyon, 1998). Most reading scientists agree that a core linguistic deficit underlies poor reading at all ages (Catts et al., 1999; Shaywitz et al., 1999). At any age, poor readers as a group exhibit weaknesses in phonological processing and word recognition speed and accuracy, as do younger poor readers (Stanovich & Siegel, 1994; Shankweiler et al., 1995). At any age, when an individual’s reading comprehension is more impaired than his or her listening comprehension, inaccurate and slow word recognition is the most likely cause (Shankweiler et al., 1999).

To complicate matters, the older student has not practiced reading and avoids reading because reading is taxing, slow, and frustrating (Ackerman & Dyckman, 1996; Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997). Therein lies the most challenging aspect of teaching older students: they cannot read so they do not like to read; reading is labored and unsatisfying so they have little reading experience; and, because they have not read much, they are not familiar with the vocabulary, sentence structure, text organization and concepts of academic “book” language. Over time, their comprehension skills decline because they do not read, and they also become poor spellers and poor writers. What usually begins as a core phonological and word recognition deficit, often associated with other language weaknesses, becomes a diffuse, debilitating problem with language — spoken and written.   Too few children can compete in higher education and about half fail to complete high school. In this community, the rate of adult illiteracy — reading below 4th grade level — is 37%, the highest in the nation. Nationally, 25% of all adults are functionally illiterate.”

Moats, L. C. (2001). When older students can't read. Educational Leadership, 58(6), 36-41.

Children and Young People's Reading in 2025

“When we published our report on children and young people’s reading last year, we warned of a situation requiring urgent attention. We were not alone in raising the alarm. The Reading Agency’s 20241 report into adult reading habits painted an equally troubling picture, revealing that only half of UK adults now read regularly for pleasure and that those aged 16 to 34 are the least likely to do so. Similar issues have been reported in the US, with studies finding marked declines in daily reading over the last 20 years2. The findings must also be seen in a global context. The latest Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) revealed worrying trends in reading enjoyment among 10-year-olds, with both England and Northern Ireland falling below the international average. In these nations, around 1 in 4 children (24% in England and 25% in Northern Ireland) reported that they did not enjoy reading compared with just 1 in 5 (18%) globally3. Together, these findings point to a broad and urgent challenge: a steady erosion of reading enjoyment across generations, with implications for literacy, wellbeing, and personal development that cannot be ignored. Children and young people’s reading in 2025 We asked 114,970 children and young people aged 5 to 18 from 515 schools across the UK who took part in our Annual Literacy Survey how they felt about reading in 2025 (see Appendix A for more information on methodology and sample). This report shows that the picture remains just as concerning one year on. Reading enjoyment in free time In 2025, reading enjoyment is at its lowest point in two decades. Over the last year, the decline has been most acute among primary-aged children and boys, particularly teenage boys:

• Just 1 in 3 (32.7%) children and young people aged 8 to 18 reported enjoying reading “very much” or “quite a lot” in 2025.
• Enjoyment levels dropped slightly (by 1.9 percentage points) from the previous year. However, the long-term fall remains stark, with levels 18.7 percentage points lower than in 2005 or, in other words, a 36% drop in the number of children and young people who say they enjoy reading in their free time.
• 3 in 5 (62.6%) children aged 5 to 8 reported enjoying reading in 2025, down 2.1 percentage points from 2024. Overall, levels for those aged 5 to 8 have remained more stable over the past six years – ‘only’ reducing by 18% between 2019 and 2025.
• Enjoying reading in free time in 2025 was associated with gender and age: more girls than boys (39.1% vs. 25.7%) and more children aged 5 to 8 (62.7%) and 8 to 11 (46.9%) enjoyed reading than those aged 11 to 14 (29.5%), 14 to 16 (28.6%) and 16 to 18 (41.1%). Slightly more children and young people who didn’t receive free school meals (FSMs) told us they enjoyed reading compared with their peers who received FSMs (33.0% vs. 31.0%).
• Enjoyment levels dropped for all children and young people regardless of their background in 2025. However, the drop was particularly pronounced for those in primary school, decreasing by 5 percentage points between 2024 and 2025.
• Between 2024 and 2025, boys’ enjoyment of reading declined across most age groups, particularly those aged 11 to 16, while girls’ enjoyment remained relatively stable or slightly improved.
• There were geographical differences in reading enjoyment. More children and young people in England told us that they enjoyed reading compared with their peers in the other UK nations. Within England, more children and young people in London and the North East enjoyed reading in their free time than their counterparts in other regions.”

Clark, C., Picton, I., & Cole, A. (2025). Children and Young People's Reading in 2025. National Literacy Trust.

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