Addressing the skills your older struggling readers may have missed

Many middle and high school teachers do not have a background that would help them define the words “phonological awareness” and “phonics.” If they do know them, they may picture elementary classrooms with alphabet charts, picture cards, and beginning readers. Even more, they assume those skills were mastered years ago.

Unfortunately, that isn’t always true.

Some older struggling readers still have gaps in one or both areas. Those gaps don’t disappear with age. Instead, students can develop coping strategies like memorizing words, guessing from the first letter, skipping unfamiliar words, or relying on context. While these strategies may help them survive, they rarely help them become confident, independent readers.

That doesn’t mean every struggling middle or high school reader needs to go back and repeat beginning phonics instruction. It means we shouldn’t assume foundational skills are intact simply because a student is older.

Assess first. Then teach what the student actually needs.

What Are Phonological and Phonemic Awareness?

Phonological awareness is the broad term for hearing and playing with spoken sounds. It includes the ability to recognize that spoken words are made up of individual sound parts.

At the surface, this is the skill needed to divide words into syllables, identify and generate rhymes, and match words with similar beginning sounds.

It involves hearing that:

• Flip is one syllable.
• Flip rhymes with trip, drip, tip, and dip.
• Flip begins with a blended onset, fl.

At a deeper level, its subcomponent, phonemic awareness, involves manipulating, adding, deleting, and substituting sounds within words. This has been linked to reading success.

For example, a student is using phonemic awareness when asked to:

• Blend /s/ /t/ /r/ /ee/ /m/ to make stream.
• Break plant into /p/ /l/ /a/ /n/ /t/.
• Say smile without the /s/.
• Change the /m/ in map to /t/ to make tap.

Phonemic awareness focuses on the sounds in spoken language. Although the skill is centered around speech, connecting those sounds to letters can strengthen reading instruction.

That last point is important with older readers. We don’t want students spending large amounts of intervention time manipulating sounds in isolation when their real goal is reading increasingly complex text.

What Is Phonics?

Phonics connects those sounds to print.

It involves understanding the relationships between sounds and the letters or letter combinations used to represent them.

Students use phonics knowledge when they:

• Decode unfamiliar words
• Read multisyllabic words
• Apply syllable types
• Recognize vowel patterns
• Read prefixes, suffixes, and roots
• Spell accurately

Here’s a simple way to think about the difference:

The two skills work together during word reading and spelling.

Why Does This Matter for Older Struggling Readers?

If a seventh grader struggles with comprehension, it can be tempting to immediately provide more comprehension instruction.

Sometimes that’s exactly what the student needs.

But sometimes the problem begins earlier in the reading process.

A student who cannot efficiently decode words such as establishment, photosynthesis, constitutional, or unpredictable has a different issue than a student who reads those words accurately and fluently but doesn’t understand the text.

That’s why identifying the root of the reading difficulty matters.

Foundational weaknesses may show up in ways that don’t immediately look like phonics needs. You may notice students:

• Guessing at unfamiliar words based on the first few letters.
• Skipping unfamiliar words.
• Reading accurately but slowly.
• Struggling disproportionately with multisyllabic words.
• Having persistent spelling difficulties.
• Reading familiar words easily but struggling with unfamiliar ones.

These behaviors don’t automatically prove that a student has a phonics or phonemic-awareness weakness. They are clues that tell us to look more closely.

Students Need Access to the Text

When word reading is slow and effortful, students must devote more attention to figuring out the words. As word reading becomes more accurate and automatic, students are better positioned to focus on constructing meaning from the text. Teaching phonics by itself will automatically improve an older student’s comprehension.

Research strongly supports explicit decoding instruction for older students who have word-reading difficulties. Improving decoding gives students better access to the words, vocabulary, and ideas they need to understand increasingly complex text.

In other words, comprehension is always the goal. Decoding helps students access the meaning of text.

Should We Teach Phonological and Phonemic Awareness to Older Students?

Sometimes, but not automatically. The fact that a student reads below grade level does not mean that student needs this level of instruction.

Start by looking at word reading. Ask yourself:

• Can the student accurately decode unfamiliar words?
• What happens with increasingly complex spelling patterns?
• What happens when the words become multisyllabic?
• Can the student spell words that use those same patterns?

If the student’s errors suggest difficulty perceiving or manipulating the sounds within words, take a closer look at phonological awareness. This keeps intervention targeted.

Instead of thinking:

Think:

That’s a much more useful intervention question.

How Do You Measure Phonological and Phonemic Awareness in Older Students?

For older readers, phonological awareness assessments should be purposeful and targeted. You’re trying to determine whether difficulty identifying or manipulating speech sounds is contributing to the student’s word-reading problems.

A few brief tasks can provide useful information.

Phoneme Segmentation

Ask students to break a spoken word into individual sounds.

Example:
plant → /p/ /l/ /a/ /n/ /t/

Blending

Say sounds individually and ask students to blend them into a word.

Example:
/s/ /t/ /r/ /ee/ /m/

Sound Deletion

Ask students to remove one sound.

Example:
Say smile without the /s/.

Sound Substitution

Replace one sound with another.

Example:
Change the /m/ in map to /t/.

Multisyllabic Manipulation

Older students should also manipulate sounds in longer words like:

• computer
• fantastic
• transportation

Watch for students who hesitate, omit sounds, confuse similar sounds, or respond slowly.

How Do You Measure Phonics and Decoding?

For older struggling readers, this is often where your assessment should begin.

You want to know what the student understands about the alphabetic system and, more importantly, whether the student can apply that knowledge to unfamiliar words. Asking students to spell words with specific characteristics can also indicate a students’ understanding of letter-sound correspondence.

Look at Decoding

Can the student accurately read words containing:

• Closed syllables
• Open syllables
• Vowel-consonant-e patterns
• Vowel teams
• R-controlled vowels
• Consonant-le syllables
• Common consonant patterns

Don’t assume that because a student knows a pattern in isolation, the student can apply it in increasingly difficult words.

Multisyllabic Words

This becomes especially important with older readers.

Can the student approach an unfamiliar long word systematically?

Can the student:

• Recognize useful word parts?
• Identify familiar spelling patterns?
• Break longer words into manageable parts?
• Use prefixes and suffixes to support word recognition?
• Blend the parts back together accurately?
• Adjust pronunciation when necessary?

The goal isn’t simply knowing the names of the six syllable types. The goal is using knowledge about written language to solve unfamiliar words.

Spelling

Don’t overlook spelling as an assessment tool.

Reading sometimes allows students to compensate using context, familiarity, or partial word recognition. Spelling requires students to work in the opposite direction, moving from sounds to written representations.

A spelling sample may reveal weaknesses that aren’t immediately obvious during oral reading.

Listen to Connected Reading

A phonics screener gives you one kind of information. Listening to the student read actual text gives you another.

Notice what happens when the student encounters an unfamiliar word.

Does the student:

• Stop and work through it?
• Guess from the first letter?
• Substitute a similar-looking word?
• Skip it?
• Wait for you to supply it?
• Decode accurately but take a long time?

Those behaviors help you determine not just what the student knows, but how independently the student applies that knowledge while reading.

When Should You Assess?

Consider screening students who:

• Read below grade level
• Struggle with spelling
• Read slowly
• Guess frequently
• Avoid unfamiliar words
• Have difficulty reading multisyllabic words
• Have a history of dyslexia or previous intervention

The goal of assessment is to identify not only what students know but also how they independently apply that knowledge while reading. That information should indicate what you should be teaching that student.

Common Assessment Tools

Many intervention teachers combine informal observations with standardized assessments.

Examples include:

• Quick Phonics Screener
• CORE Phonics Survey
• Acadience Reading (selected measures)
• Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP-2)
• Test of Word Reading Efficiency (TOWRE-2)
• Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests

No single assessment tells the whole story, so pair assessment data with oral reading, spelling samples, and classroom observations to develop a complete picture of a student’s reading needs.

Responding to Assessment

Finding a weakness does not necessarily mean you need to start an older student at the very beginning of a phonics program and work through to the end. These struggling readers often have more holes than cliffs, meaning they may have missing pieces of information rather than no knowledge whatsoever.

A student might demonstrate strong knowledge of most basic patterns but consistently struggle with vowel teams.

Another might read one-syllable words easily but fall apart when encountering multisyllabic words.

Yet another may decode accurately but so slowly that automaticity is the greater concern.

Of course another may have solid decoding skills, meaning phonics isn’t the problem at all.

Assessment helps you find the missing piece.

Then you can swing back, explicitly teach what the student missed, and move forward into the grade-level reading the student needs to access.

The Bottom Line

Phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, and phonics are typically thought of as primary-grade skills, but they remain critical for older struggling readers.

Phonological awareness and phonemic awareness are the abilities to recognize, manipulate, and work with the sounds of spoken language.

Phonics teaches students how those sounds connect to letters and spelling patterns.

When either skill is weak, reading becomes slow, inaccurate, and exhausting. Students may appear to struggle with comprehension, motivation, or vocabulary when the real issue is a gap in foundational reading skills.

These gaps can be addressed with explicit, systematic instruction and targeted assessment, and older students can strengthen their decoding skills, improve reading fluency, and free up valuable mental energy for what matters most: understanding and enjoying what they read.

Before assuming a student has a comprehension problem, take a closer look at the foundation. Sometimes the fastest path to stronger comprehension begins with the earliest reading skills.

For More Information

For resources that build phonological and phonics skills, visit our TpT store’s Decoding section or our website’s Phonics for Older Students section.

If you receive our biweekly newsletter, be sure to check our Freebie Library for additional decoding materials.