Building a classroom that supports adolescent literacy

There’s plenty of drama in middle school—some of it even on students’ reading lists!

These are the years when students build the language, knowledge, confidence, and habits they’ll need for the rest of school (and life)—and this includes the ability to access increasingly complex texts. With so much under construction at once, it’s crucial to keep reading at the center.

The Science of Reading makes the case for systematic, explicit instruction in early literacy, but adolescent literacy is a whole different ball game. Middle (and high) school readers are at a different stage of development, cautions Doug Fisher, Ph.D. This means the frameworks and guidance built for early literacy may no longer apply.

Middle schoolers need intentional literacy support of their own—and our new ebook, Bringing the Science of Reading to Middle School, breaks down how you can provide just that.

Why middle school is different

Early adolescence is the second-largest stage of rapid brain development (after early childhood), with much of it taking place in the prefrontal cortex—the region brain researcher Maryanne Wolf, Ph.D., calls “the cognitive workspace.” While middle schoolers can handle complex ideas, they’re still developing the skills they need for strong reading: sustained attention, forward planning, shifting perspectives, and self-regulation.

Meanwhile, they care deeply about what their peers think, can be sensitive to failure, and still need guidance from adults (sometimes even when they say “No, I’m good”).

Texts in grades 6–8 also carry more complex syntax and specialized vocabulary than before. Students are now asked to interpret subtle meanings, integrate and continue building knowledge, and sustain attention across longer and harder tasks.

It’s a lot to juggle and synthesize at a life moment full of pressures and distractions. Literacy consultant Jeanne Schopf notes that sometimes a middle schooler who seems disengaged may just have hit a gap in their previous learning that’s slowing them down. It’s a period during which teachers must take care not to let observations and assumptions lead to lowered expectations, which in turn can stall student growth.

Middle school students are still capable of taking academic risks and persisting in their learning, but need instruction that feels relevant to and respectful of their lives, and that is socially safe.

What “foundational skills” means for a 13-year-old

In early elementary instruction, “foundational skills” refers to the building blocks of reading. Middle school moves the needle forward, as these foundational skills become the skills essential for reading as an adult.

Adolescent readers still need support with automaticity, vocabulary, morphology, and sentence comprehension, but that support should be age-appropriate, embedded in meaningful reading, and tied to the texts students are actually studying.

Fisher proposes a model he calls the Reading Circuit, in which adolescent literacy depends on several interconnected capacities working together, from word recognition and sentence-level analysis to background knowledge and self-efficacy. Under this model, no single skill carries the load.

Two ways to start in the classroom

Our ebook lays out six classroom practices that promote middle school literacy. Here are two to get you started:

Keep complex text central. Struggling readers need more support with rich, complex text, not reduced access to it. PreK–12 literacy facilitator Julie Burtscher Brown, Ed.D., says that leveling text down means students lose the chance to grow language, knowledge, and confidence, and Schopf makes the same point. While reducing expectations can feel supportive in the moment, it can also rob students of vocabulary, syntax, and rigor. The solution: scaffolding, not substitution.
Help students read accurately without reducing rigor. Often the ideas in a complex text are well within a middle schooler’s reach—it’s the words that can be stumbling blocks, especially the big ones. Brown recommends quick routines that can help clear the way before reading: flag a few key terms, break them into meaningful parts, and have students say and use them. It takes minutes, not a separate lesson, and it lets students spend their effort on thinking instead of decoding.

Also essential: cultivating fluency, vocabulary, sentence-level understanding, and the conditions that make students willing to take academic risks.

What leaders can do

Classroom practice matters enormously, but Schopf argues that adolescent literacy also depends on school leadership. Here are two of the four core leadership needs described in our ebook:

Protect time for support. If teachers can identify students who need more support but can’t find time for it during the day, the system hasn’t responded meaningfully. It’s up to leadership to make school-wide commitments to WIN (What I Need) blocks, flexible intervention periods, or other scheduling solutions.
Narrow the focus. Schools often overload teachers with competing initiatives. Literacy has to become a top priority, and that sometimes means de-implementation as much as implementation.

Kymyona Burk, Ed.D., senior policy fellow for literacy at ExcelinEd, notes that older students also benefit when systems screen universally, identify needs early, and intervene rather than wait for challenges to accumulate.

No reinvention required

None of this requires a whole new theory of middle school reading—it’s all within reach for students, teachers, and leaders. Building literacy in adolescence calls for us to do what we already know works: keep the texts rich, scaffold thoughtfully, build knowledge on purpose, watch the data to catch problems early, and treat literacy as everyone’s job.

Middle schoolers have plenty of attention to give—we just need to support their literacy in a way that earns it.

Download the ebook.

Listen to the podcast episodes cited here.

K–5 literacy: How assessment data and classroom observations work together

A digital guide titled “What Measures Show and What Teachers Observe” features icons, a classroom photo, and text about K–5 literacy instruction, including topics such as the science of reading and oral reading fluency, all set on a white background with an orange border.

Imagine a first-grader reading a decodable book about day and night. She hits the word “sunset,” which appears under a picture of a sky turning orange. She might get as far as /s/ /u/ /n/, and, using the picture, guess “sunshine” or even “sundown.”

But as a teacher, you hear her keep going and work out the whole word: /s/ /u/ /n/, /s/ /e/ /t/. That’s the alphabetic principle at work. It’s the understanding that letters represent the sounds of speech, and that those sounds can be translated back into words. You can’t watch a student understand something, but you can watch a first-grader turn six letters she’s never seen in that order into a word she already knows.

Meanwhile, somewhere in your assessment data, this student has a score from a measure that asked her to decode words with common sound-spelling patterns, under the same conditions as every other student in the class.

One competency, two records. One is in a report, and the other just happened at your small-group table. One is built for consistency and comparison, while the other is built into the ordinary business of teaching. When you can move easily between them, you get a fuller picture of how your students are growing as readers.

Two views of the same literacy skills

A standardized measure gives you something your daily observations can’t: a consistent, comparable look at every student in your class taken under the same conditions on a predictable schedule. It tells you quickly where each student stands, where the class as a whole needs support, and how that picture changes over the year.

Your classroom observations give you something else. Continuous rather than periodic, they occur in contexts in which students are using literacy skills for real purposes rather than demonstrating them on request. It’s the same idea behind formative assessment, which gathers evidence of learning as it’s happening rather than after the fact.

Neither view can replace the other—a screener isn’t designed to tell you what a skill looks like when a student uses it independently at 10:40 a.m. on a Tuesday, and no amount of observation can give you a standardized comparison across a full class. But when you know which classroom behaviors correspond to which measured competencies, each view can make the other more meaningful.

Example: What the data measures and what you see

Accurate, efficient word reading is critical for early literacy and is strongly correlated with reading comprehension. It’s also where the connection between data and observation may be easiest to see, because the behaviors are so concrete.

Take the alphabetic principle. This measure is about decoding: reading or producing written words with common sound-spelling patterns. It tells you whether a student can recognize letter-sound correspondences and blend them into words.

A student who is writing the letters corresponding to the sounds in ship — /sh/ /i/ /p/ — is doing the same letter-sound work our first-grader did, just in the other direction.

Then there’s oral reading fluency. This measure tracks accuracy and words read correctly per minute as students read grade-level text. A student with strong oral fluency reads accurately and smoothly, with fewer pauses and fewer attempts to sound words out.

In both of these measures, accuracy refers to words, and measures to what degree the student is reading them correctly, while automaticity is what you hear when a student reads those words without visible effort. When that happens, more of their attention is available to consider what the words mean when put together.

What only you can hear, beyond correctness and speed, is fluency’s third piece: expression. A student who groups words into phrases, drops their voice at a period, and makes a question sound like a question is showing you something a words-per-minute score doesn’t capture on its own: that they’re both decoding the words and following their meaning as they go.

Here’s how having both sources of data helps you out: A score will tell you a student’s rate and accuracy are on pace for first grade, and how that’s moved since fall. That’s a comparison you simply can’t make by ear, across a class, from memory. Then there’s what you hear: whether the student is reading in phrases, getting a feel for the punctuation, making it sound like they get it. Put the two together and you know more than either gives you alone: that they’re on pace, and what on-pace sounds like for this individual student.

What happens when you put it all together

Screening happens on a schedule, but students grow all year long—and having access to both types of data can help you sharpen your focus between assessment windows.

Our new infographic, What Measures Show and What Teachers Observe: A Guide to Data-Informed K–5 Literacy Instruction, lays it all out: word-level and text-level competencies, what standardized measures capture, and what the corresponding classroom behavior looks like, side by side. These insights keep you aware of your students’ growth, day in and day out.

Keep it handy during a read-aloud, bring it to your next meeting, or share it with a colleague. Knowing what a given competency looks like in daily classroom life gives you the chance to see development as it happens and make data-informed decisions. Together, these things can provide a full, textured answer to the million-dollar question: How is this reader doing?

Making reading comprehension connections

A smiling girl in a green shirt sits at a desk with an open book, holding a pencil, highlighting the importance of literacy benchmarks. A yellow background with a book icon is shown behind her.

Comprehension isn’t just a process, or just a product—it’s both. And connecting reading and understanding is what most teachers are working on every day.

That fundamental connection was the focus of our recent Science of Reading Webinar Week: Comprehension Connections—Building the Bridge Between Reading and Understanding, a five-day, expert-filled series that unpacked what really drives comprehension, from early decoding to middle school mastery.

Here’s a quick look at what you’ll learn when you watch—and a few ideas you can use right away.

Day 1: What Is Reading Comprehension, Anyway?

Speaker: Susan Lambert, Ed.D., Chief Academic Officer, Literacy, Amplify; Host of Science of Reading: The Podcast

“Reading comprehension is more than just language comprehension. It’s language comprehension on the page, which makes it much more complex.” — Susan Lambert, Ed.D.

If you ask ten teachers to define comprehension, you might get twelve answers. Lambert opened the week by grounding everyone in the Science of Reading, including the Simple View of Reading and the Reading Rope. Skilled reading, she reminded viewers, is the result of multiple strands—decoding, language comprehension, and knowledge—woven together over time.

The takeaway? The most effective approaches don’t teach comprehension strategies—such as “find the main idea”—in isolation. Rather, they connect word recognition to meaning through rich texts, conversation, and writing. Whether you’re teaching second-grade reading comprehension or sixth-grade reading comprehension, students need the same thing: a clear path from sounding out words to making sense of ideas.

Day 2: Comprehension and Knowledge Building: A Two-Way Street

Speakers: Sonia Cabell, Ph.D., Sigmon Endowed Professor of Reading Education, Florida State University

HyeJin Hwang, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

“Better background knowledge leads to improved reading comprehension, which in turn enables readers to learn more from text, thereby building additional knowledge.” —HyeJin Hwang, Ph.D.

In their session, Sonia Cabell and HyeJin Hwang explored one of the clearest findings in reading research: Comprehension and knowledge develop together. Cabell began by explaining how comprehension (including oral language, background knowledge, vocabulary, syntax, and verbal reasoning) forms one of the essential strands of the Reading Rope.

Students can’t activate knowledge they don’t yet have. Teachers need to help them build it early, and intentionally. Cabell’s research found that integrating literacy and content instruction produced gains in vocabulary and content knowledge.

Likewise, Hwang’s two large-scale longitudinal studies showed that better knowledge instruction leads to better reading, which leads to even more knowledge. These findings held true across languages and grade levels, underscoring the universal value of content-rich instruction.

Classroom takeaways:

Plan literacy units around connected science or social studies topics to build coherent knowledge.
Use content-rich interactive read-alouds with discussion before, during, and after reading.
Ask inferential comprehension questions (“Why?” “How?”) that require students to connect ideas using their own words.
Encourage quick writing or drawing tasks that help students show what they’ve learned.

Day 3: Where and How to Measure Comprehension to Drive Improvement

Speakers: Danielle Damico, Ph.D., Executive Director of Learning Science, Amplify

Gina Biancarosa, Ed.D., Ann Swindells Chair in Education, University of Oregon

“Reading comprehension is both a process and a product.” —Danielle Damico, Ph.D.

Too often, comprehension is measured only as a finished product—how well students answer questions after reading—without revealing how they built understanding along the way. This session explored what comprehension actually involves: reading words accurately, understanding their meaning, applying background knowledge, and making inferences. As researcher Sharon Vaughn, Ph.D., has described, these interconnected skills all work together as students learn to read.

Biancarosa showed how looking at comprehension as a complex process helps teachers see student thinking in action. She described the major types of inferences—lexical, bridging, gap-filling, and causal—and the importance of understanding how students connect ideas and construct meaning.

Try this:

Treat comprehension as ongoing thinking, not a one-time test score.
Use brief think-alouds or class discussions to get a look at how students connect ideas.
Match assessments to the precise question you’re trying to answer.
Let assessment guide instruction—data should lead directly to next steps.

Day 4: Comprehension in Middle School: More Important Than Ever

Speaker: Deb Sabin, Chief Academic Officer, Amplify ELA

“Writing done right encodes knowledge. And discourse done right gets into the realm of higher-order thinking.” —Deb Sabin

By the time you’re teaching fourth-grade reading comprehension through sixth-grade reading comprehension, decoding should be automatic. At this stage, the upper strands of the Reading Rope—vocabulary, background knowledge, and syntax—move to the forefront. In this session, Deb Sabin highlighted how comprehension in middle school relies on academic knowledge, disciplinary vocabulary, and structured discourse—and how it truly blossoms when reading, writing, and speaking reinforce one another.

Classroom moves that help:

Pair writing with reading: Even short, text-based responses consolidate knowledge in long-term memory.
Use structured discussion (“accountable talk”), where students cite text evidence and build on one another’s ideas.
Center rich, grade-level texts that challenge thinking and vocabulary.

Day 5: Finding the Missing Link in Reading Comprehension to Boost Literacy Success

Speaker: Julie A. Van Dyke, Ph.D., Clinical Assistant Professor, Yale University Child Study Center; Research Scientist, Yale-UConn Haskins Global Literacy Hub

“Teach phonics for decoding. Teach syntax for understanding.” —Julie A. Van Dyke, Ph.D.

In the final presentation of the series, Julie Van Dyke explored an often-overlooked element of comprehension: syntax—the way words combine to create meaning. Van Dyke argued that syntax is to comprehension what phonics is to decoding.

She illustrated how the Science of Reading and the Reading Rope locate syntax within the language-comprehension strands—critical to understanding who did what to whom in complex sentences. Explicitly teaching sentence structure helps all learners, including multilingual/English learners, access higher-level meaning.

Simple practices can make a difference:

Have students paraphrase tricky sentences. (Starter question: “Who’s doing the action?”)
Pull strong sentences from your class texts to show how structure shapes meaning.
Encourage students to mirror those structures in their own writing.

What linked all five sessions together? The understanding that comprehension develops when teachers connect the code, the language, and the knowledge. Whether students are decoding in second grade or crafting essays in sixth, they thrive when we help them move from reading to understanding—step by step, strand by strand.

Watch all five on-demand recordings.

More to explore:

Download your Comprehension 101 bundle.
Read (and comprehend!): Reading comprehension strategies grounded in science
Listen to this special Essentials episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast, where Susan Lambert and other experts distill key reading comprehension insights.