To the Editor:
Rebecca Kockler of the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund is spot-on when she says that decoding skills must continue to develop and evolve as students move beyond 3rd grade. (“One Reading Skill Might Be Responsible for Many Older Students’ Struggles,” March 25, 2026.)
In my more than 40 years of teaching adolescents and training thousands of educators, I have frequently observed that older students struggle with reading because they have difficulty decoding multisyllabic words. When students can’t accurately read the words in front of them, they can’t fully access grade-level texts across subjects.
This is why advanced word study should be a core part of instruction for all students in grades 4–12—not just students with reading difficulty. Building on foundational phonics, this work focuses on more complex word structures, including syllables and meaningful word parts (morphemes), like prefixes, suffixes, and roots. This instruction can and should take place in all subject areas, giving students regular opportunities to apply these skills to the kinds of words they encounter in real texts, from “disrupted” and “conventional” in grades 4 and 5 to “longitudinal,” “crustacean,” and “eukaryotic” in middle and high school.
One of the key recommendations in the 2022 What Works Clearinghouse practice guide “Providing Reading Interventions for Students in Grades 4-9” is to teach students a consistent word-analysis routine for multisyllabic words. Students benefit from learning how to identify word parts, say each part, and then blend the parts together to form the word. They also need to learn how to adjust vowel sounds, including the “schwa” vowel commonly found in unaccented syllables.
If we expect students to read and understand increasingly complex texts, our instruction has to reflect how those words actually work. Without continued attention to advanced decoding, too many students hit a ceiling because they can’t fully access the language of the text.
Joan Sedita
Founder
Keys to Literacy
Rowley, Mass.
