Meeting the Needs of Middle School Readers Struggling with Comprehension

In so many ways, reading is a success marker and critical part of daily life. When it comes to reading with middle school students, a number of factors might be hindering progress. This post explores some possible reasons for breakdowns in comprehension and offers solutions for working with your child to determine what the cause of this frustration might be.

It should be noted that in some cases children require the intensive support of experts in the reading field, including those who can diagnose and address issues like dyslexia. This post is not intended to replace work like this, but instead to help families determine what is best for their children.

Sound and Mapping Steps

Of first concern, you might consider how your child performs when navigating new words. It might be that developing some essential decoding and sounding out skills is what’s needed to get to understanding. This focus on phonics is hardly new and has gotten a renewed wave of attention in recent years. 

Rightly so. Phonics is an important step in reading development. It should also be noted that phonics mastery should be developing alongside other reading skills, like comprehension. We do not first sound out and then understand. 

Yet, the simple truth is that if a child is spending vast amounts of time and energy on navigating some essential vocabulary, they might need to explore some regular patterns in language.

Hint: Saying “sound it out” is probably not as helpful for older readers. This is probably not the first time they have heard this coaching statement, and they likely need something more specific. Instead, try: “How does this part of the word sound?” “How does the sound change when we combine it with another word part?”

This approach can help with the sound and pronunciation pattern of a range of words — from cowbell to prestidigitation.

Paths to Understanding

But my child reads just fine when sounding out and saying words out loud. What’s next? First, that’s fantastic if it’s the case. Your child has a strong mastery of phonics, or mapping sounds to written language. If they read fairly quickly and with accuracy, they also have attained fluency.

When it comes to reading comprehension, understanding the words once we know how they are supposed to sound (or, ideally, as we are learning how to say them) really comes down to two forks in the road of reading.

One is vocabulary. Perhaps this is simply a word that’s new and unfamiliar, and so we must determine the meaning from context, what we know about word parts (like anti- or -ily), or looking up the word if those two strategies still keep us guessing.

Another fork in this road deals with background or conceptual knowledge. Perhaps this is a new topic — which also is likely to include a lot of new and unfamiliar words. Taking some time to build some conversation and awareness around new topics might help add some context to these new words and the relationships between and among them.

But…Everything Seems to Work Until I Ask Them Questions

But my child sounds out words, knows what they mean, is familiar with the general topic, and is still not sure of what the text is saying.

Fear not. Your child has mastered a lot. Now might be the time for some guiding questions to link concepts. It might be time to think about thinking (metacognition). This means pausing, sometimes rereading, and clarifying relationships and ideas to build concepts as information is broken down and then built back up again.

Think of this as teleportation. “Beam me up, ideas.” An author has taken the time and trouble to put their thinking on a page in a coded system of letters and symbols (called writing). For the teleportation to work, those words and ideas have to be broken up, considered, and reconstructed in the mind of the reader. It’s actually really cool when you think about it.

This also means that this text will never be exactly the same as it was before. Its essential message, like DNA, is now mapped on to the experiences, insights, and emotions of your child. Very cool indeed.

Processing and Practicing

If there are still loose connections or if a text takes multiple visits from a reader, that’s also part of the process. Even as someone who has been reading for a while, I still have to reread some texts when I encounter them for the first time. 

Remember that skills like fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension should start early, but should also be built throughout a reader’s life. Reading and writing are both practices which involve several discrete skills working together.

Keep reading, celebrating the written word, embracing the importance of authorship — and keep practicing.