It reported fluency improvement, but it would be impossible to attribute this to the phonics portion of the intervention.Īnother study focused on a district school improvement effort that provided district wide phonics teaching (Hutcheson, Selig, & Young, 1990). One study had high school students tutoring struggling sixth graders in phonics, sight word phrases, and text reading fluency (Lingo, 2014). I found only 4 studies worth mentioning and none of these were particularly encouraging. ![]() Accordingly, I conducted a search of studies that focused on phonics in middle school and high school. Of course, the NRP report is 23 years old… there must be lots of new research on this topic that would provide us with a more definitive answer to your question. There were insufficient data to draw any conclusions about the effects of phonics instruction with normally developing readers above 1st grade.” 2-116 However, phonics instruction appears to contribute only weakly, if at all, in helping poor readers apply these skills to read text and to spell words. Findings indicate that phonics instruction helps poor readers in 2nd through 6th grades improve their word reading skills. “Because most of the comparisons above 1st grade involved poor readers (78%), the conclusions drawn about the effects of phonics instruction on specific reading outcomes pertain mainly to them. Although gains were significant for the subgroup of disabled readers ( d = 0.32), they were not significant for the older group in general ( d = 0.12).” p. “The effects of systematic phonics instruction on text comprehension in readers above 1st grade were mixed. Possible reasons might be that the phonics instruction provided to low-achieving readers was not sufficiently intense, or that their reading difficulties arose from sources not treated by phonics instruction such as poor comprehension, or there were too few cases (i.e., only eight treatment-control comparisons pulled from three studies) to yield reliable findings.” p. The effect size was d = 0.15, which was not statistically greater than chance. “However, phonics instruction failed to exert a significant impact on the reading performance of low-achieving readers in 2nd through 6th grades (i.e., children with reading difficulties and possibly other cognitive difficulties explaining their low achievement). Here are some relevant quotes from that report: In any event, the NRP found few benefits to phonics instruction, beyond grades K-1. That poses multiple problems – there are reasons to believe that those populations may be particularly difficult to teach effectively and the generalizability of those results to regular classrooms are dubious. There have been some studies focused on the teaching of phonics in grades 2 and up, but not many, and most of those studies were aimed at struggling readers or dyslexic students. Making explicit, systematic phonics part of a comprehensive reading and writing program for beginning readers is a no brainer. ![]() The National Early Literacy Panel (NELP) and the National Reading Panel (NRP) reported clear benefits to such instruction: improvements in the ability to read words and nonsense words, spelling, oral reading fluency, and reading comprehension. Not surprisingly, most phonics instruction studies have been focused on preschool, kindergarten, and grade 1. ![]() I would be interested what the research says about teaching phonics in middle school. This may need to happen for some students, but I imagine that Tier 1 instruction would focus on higher levels of structured literacy like morphology. Some parents are wondering if phonics instruction should continue into middle school. What does the science prioritize for middle level ELA instruction? Is there a point when teaching into a phonics gap for students does not have a payoff? With limited time in a middle school classroom, I am thinking about what needs to be prioritized. This has me wondering about the middle level. We have been working on strengthening and refining our early literacy instruction to be in line with the science.
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