Data from across the United States highlights pressing literacy challenges among striving middle school students who are not yet able to read and comprehend grade-level texts. The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) clarified that 70% of 8th graders were not yet proficient readers, a statistic consistent with decades of similar data. This trend suggests that current methods for supporting students’ reading development need reevaluation, in service to children of all ages who have a right to literacy.
Is Comprehension Really the Core Issue?
Middle school educators often misidentify comprehension as the core issue of their striving middle school readers. Teachers may observe their students’ difficulty in understanding text or see data pointing to low reading comprehension. As a result, interventions at the secondary level tend to focus on explicit comprehension instruction. While many students do benefit from this, a large number of striving middle school readers must master foundational literacy skills before they can fully engage with comprehension-focused interventions. This aligns with the Simple View of Reading model of literacy development (Gough and Tunmer, 1986) which states that reading comprehension is the product of both decoding skills and language comprehension.
Foundational Skills: Essential for Reading Achievement
To effectively support striving middle school readers, educators must ensure that students have crossed the decoding threshold. This occurs when the ability to accurately decode individual words, including those that are multisyllabic and complex, becomes automatic, paving the way for fluent reading and meaningful comprehension.
Compelling research (Wang et al., 2019) indicates that students who have not yet reached this threshold do not benefit from the comprehension-focused interventions typically used in upper elementary and secondary grades. Therefore, older students with weak decoding skills must receive intervention that includes targeted instruction in phonics and decoding before focusing primarily on comprehension skills and strategies.
Structured Literacy and the Science of Reading
Regardless of age, students who need to build or solidify a strong reading foundation must be instructed in alignment with the science of reading. Structured Literacy approaches, grounded in this science, have proven effective for readers of all ages, including those with learning challenges like dyslexia. Structured Literacy emphasizes skill development across the domains of word recognition and language comprehension, as illustrated by Scarborough’s Reading Rope (Scarborough, 2001). Structured Literacy not only focuses on providing explicit, systematic, cumulative instruction in the structures of language, it also integrates the five pillars of reading instruction identified by the National Reading Panel (2000): phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.
The Role of Middle School Educators
Empathy is essential when considering the demands on today’s middle school teachers. In addition to delivering standards-aligned, grade-level content that is differentiated to meet classroom needs, many middle school teachers need to provide students with foundational literacy support, yet most lack training in this area (Pedrazzi, 2023). A 2024 RAND report highlights that approximately one-third of middle school ELA teachers frequently engage students in foundational reading activities to address such areas as phonological awareness and phonics. This underscores the importance of providing middle school teachers with evidence- aligned, age-appropriate intervention resources, along with training and support to make implementation easy and enjoyable.
This is where Tier 2 offerings like EPS Reading Accelerator can serve as a powerful support for both middle school educators and students alike. Reading Accelerator follows the Structured Literacy approach and is designed to efficiently support middle school students in mastering foundational reading skills in less than one school year. Once middle school students have crossed the decoding threshold through a research-based program like Reading Accelerator, they will experience the feeling of success that comes with being ready for more advanced literacy instruction in areas such as vocabulary development, word study, and comprehension, enabling an ever-deepening relationship with literacy and the opportunity for a new level of academic success.