Last week, Alexis Sorenson introduced her 8th graders to algebraic expressions with a lesson on Greek language roots rather than formulas.
Sorenson, a math teacher at Cloquet Middle School in the eastern Minnesota district of the same name, drew careful boxes around the prefixes in “polynomial,” “binomial,” and “trinomial.”
“I explained that ‘poly’ meant ‘many,’ so this could be an expression with many, with any number of terms,” Sorenson said. And she watched her students reason through the meanings of the other expressions based on vocabulary roots.
Sorenson attributes her students’ language and content growth to the school’s intensive training for teachers across the curriculum in supporting basic reading skills. The school implemented universal screening of both comprehension and foundational reading skills; teachers learned how to use this data to identify specific phonics and fluency gaps and design opportunities for students to practice the skills, based on a reading interventions guide put out by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences.
Their strategies include reading more archival documents aloud in a history class with scaffolding, discussing the linguistic roots of math and scientific terms, and teaching written note-taking techniques and deconstructing morphemes—like prefixes and suffixes—of new vocabulary in any subject.
Sorenson never thought about her students’ reading levels when teaching math before the training, she said.
“I mostly ignored vocabulary; in fact, I often tried to call a term by something simpler, because I thought that would bring it down to their level and help them remember better,” Sorenson said. “But now that I’m intentional about vocabulary, breaking the terms down, they remember so much better what things are.”
While most educators focus on content comprehension and writing after primary school, experts say a rising share of students enter middle school with deep, often hidden gaps in foundational literacy skills like phonics, word recognition, and oral-language fluency. Preparing teachers specializing in subjects across the curriculum to spot warning signs of decoding or other basic skills gaps can boost not only reading performance but also content understanding, according to Joan Sedita, a literacy teacher trainer and author of The Essentials of Adolescent Literacy.
“The lack of comprehension is often the tip of the iceberg, and you don’t know what’s underneath,” Sedita said.
Understanding what causes older students to struggle with reading
Partly, that’s because most middle and high schools don’t have comprehensive approaches to literacy. A middle school STEM or social studies teacher, responsible for 180 students in a semester, has a lot on their plate already and not much experience working on literacy skills.
But Sorenson and other content-area teachers at Cloquet, which serves students in grades 5-8, are finding new ways to spot reading problems and reinforce basic skills among their students as part of the school’s intensive, schoolwide literacy initiative.
Since the school started training all teachers to support foundational reading skills in 2023-24, the share of 8th graders deemed at high risk in reading comprehension on the school’s diagnostic test has fallen from 15% to 4%, according to Principal Tom Brenner. While 40% of students still enter the school with gaps in decoding skills, that share now drops to 18% by 6th grade and only 2% by 8th grade, Brenner said.
Cloquet’s literacy problem went under the radar for years, said Nicole Vagar, director of the school’s multi-tiered systems of support, because the school’s reading assessments didn’t probe enough into students’ foundational skills. They only started to understand when interventionists began to see more and more students struggle with decoding.
The clues to the problem, as other researchers have begun to document, often show up later. Many of the students can sound out easily decodable one-syllable words. But multisyllabic words—including the ones formed from meaning-rich prefixes and suffixes that make up each content area’s specialized vocabulary—can throw them off.
What’s more, teachers face the challenge of plugging those gaps while also keeping on pace with content, something that helps them build background knowledge, another component of understanding what they read.
“As students grow into 6th grade math and science and social studies, those multisyllabic words come faster at them, the vocabulary comes faster at them, and if they don’t have the proper strategies, they start to lose ground,” Brenner said. “That’s where we really start to notice a dip.”
Rising need for basic skills
Nationwide, 8th graders now have the lowest reading performance in more than 30 years on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. NAEP, like most middle school assessments, does not directly measure foundational literacy skills, but the share of 8th graders who do not meet basic reading benchmarks has grown 8 percentage points since 2013, to 30% of all students.
Douglas Fisher, a literacy researcher and professor and chairman of educational leadership at San Diego State University, studied 300 struggling readers in California as part of work with the City Heights Educational Collaborative in San Diego in the early 2000s. He studied similar San Diego students in 2025. Twenty years ago, students mostly needed support with vocabulary, background knowledge, verbal reasoning, and comprehension, Fisher found. By contrast struggling readers in the same communities today are more likely to also struggle with word recognition, phonics, and fluency—reading swiftly and with automaticity.
“The needs were just different,” Fisher said. “We had way more kids working on automaticity and word recognition, kids in phonics who simply did not know how to read a C-V-C word,” one that follows a basic consonant-vowel-consonant pattern.
Fisher and Sedita noted several warning signs of decoding and other basic skills gaps in older students, including:
- Slow, monotone, and self-conscious oral reading, particularly in a student who shows content understanding in other ways.
- Avoidance of pleasure reading.
- Reliance on guessing and illustrations for making sense of text.
- Misbehavior or joking during lessons that require reading and writing.
“Older students often have developed some knowledge of phonics; it’s just very scattered, and where those holes are is different for every single kid,” said Sedita, who likens adolescent reading problems to Swiss cheese. “You slice it in the middle and Johnny might have gaps in certain basic or advanced phonics skills. And then you slice at the same place for Maria and she has completely different holes.”
Unlike young students with decoding problems, Sedita and Fisher said adolescents can get bored with traditional phonics scope and sequence, which are typically aimed at much younger children. They need instruction targeted to the specific skills needed to access the academic content for their grade level.
Unified literacy push
One benefit of having a large population of struggling readers: It forced Cloquet to use a holistic approach.
“We knew there were too many kids with problems to be able to remediate our way out of this,” Brenner said.
The school switched to ReadBasix, a reading diagnostic test that directly measures some foundational skills, and teacher teams across content areas now meet daily to review students’ literacy data and decide on skills to incorporate into lessons.
Teachers are also learning better ways to support and challenge struggling readers. Previously, said Jason Barney, a 5th grade teacher at Cloquet, content-area middle school teachers tended to simply read a difficult word for a struggling student to avoid breaking the flow of class discussion. “But in doing that, the student never learned how to really attack the word,” he said.
As teachers have coordinated reinforcement of decoding strategies across grades and subjects, more students are reading challenging texts on their own.
“Specifically in science, now that they’ve got the Latin and Greek morphology, the words are coming together for the older kids moving to 6th, 7th, 8th grades,” he said. “Not only are they able to sound out the words—speak them—but understand, too.”
