By the time students reach upper elementary, middle, and high school, reading challenges become more difficult to untangle. Assessments and classroom assignments typically focus on comprehension, making it natural to view comprehension as the primary area of concern. As a result, when students struggle to make meaning from text, comprehension-focused intervention often seems like the obvious next step.
Yet comprehension challenges can be a symptom—not the root cause of reading difficulties.
As the Simple View of Reading reminds us, reading comprehension depends on two essential components: accurate, automatic word recognition and strong language comprehension. Weaknesses in either can limit a student’s ability to understand text. Before selecting an intervention for secondary striving readers, educators should first ask an important question: What is this student’s most urgent unmet literacy need?
For some students, the greatest barrier to reading achievement is rooted in foundational skill gaps. Because phonics and decoding instruction often fades after the early grades—and may not have been delivered explicitly and systematically in the first place—many older striving readers may not have developed the automatic word recognition needed to read increasingly complex text. Students with this profile may read slowly, guess at unfamiliar words, tire quickly when reading independently, or understand far more when text is read aloud than when they read it themselves. These students frequently appear to have comprehension difficulties when the underlying challenge is the mental effort required to read individual words accurately and efficiently.
Other striving readers present a very different profile. Their decoding is solid, but they struggle because of limited vocabulary, background knowledge, understanding of language structures, or comprehension strategies. These students benefit from language-focused intervention that strengthens the knowledge and thinking required to understand increasingly complex text.
In other words, two students may demonstrate similar comprehension difficulties—yet they require very different instructional responses. That’s why identifying where reading is breaking down matters. Intervention is most effective when it targets the barrier that is currently limiting a student’s reading development. A one-size-fits-all approach may not address the instructional need that deserves attention first.
At the same time, addressing foundational skill gaps should never mean limiting students’ opportunities to engage with grade-level ideas and academic content. Literacy experts such as Tim Shanahan and Natalie Wexler have emphasized the importance of continuing to build language, vocabulary, and knowledge through meaningful engagement with complex grade-level text, scaffolded appropriately. Older striving readers should receive intervention that explicitly targets their highest-priority literacy need while also participating in instruction that provides access to grade-level content through scaffolds, discussion, and supported reading experiences.
For district and school leaders, this student-centered approach can help shift the conversation from “Which intervention should we use?” to “What is preventing this student from moving forward as a reader—what's the most urgent literacy need?”
When intervention begins with this central question, instructional decisions can be better matched to student needs. Students whose greatest need is foundational decoding can receive explicit, systematic instruction to build word recognition skills and automaticity. Students whose decoding is secure can receive support focused on language comprehension, including morphology, vocabulary, close reading, and critical thinking. Throughout the process, all students—striving and advanced readers alike—continue engaging with grade-level content to build the knowledge and language that support future learning.
Identifying a Striving Reader’s Most Urgent Literacy Need provides a practical framework and suggested tools for determining whether a student’s greatest barrier lies in decoding, language comprehension, or both—and offers guidance for matching intervention to that need.
To continue reading, fill out this short form
