How do we cope with older students who are still struggling with literacy?

Educators at intermediate and secondary school levels know better than anyone the challenges many students face when it comes to literacy. 

Balancing a wide range of learning needs in the classroom with ongoing changes from the Ministry of Education can feel overwhelming at times. This has led educators to seek practical solutions that can support their students without adding to their already heavy workload.

A recent NZQA report on the literacy and numeracy co-requisite assessment revealed concerning pass rates¹. While it’s important to reflect on these results, it’s essential to focus on solutions rather than dwell on the challenges and catastrophise the education system.

The Ministry of Education is mandating a structured literacy approach in primary schools and introducing a phonics check for new entrants. While this represents a significant step forward, we need to ask what can be done to support students who have already finished primary school, and are years behind their expected literacy level?

The challenge for secondary schools is that subject teachers don’t have the time in class to address basic literacy difficulties as well as teaching their subjects. Teachers then have the discouraging experience of covering subject matter in class, knowing that a relatively high proportion of their students will never be able to cope with written assignments or tackle examinations. Some will even struggle to read the text in the first place.

This is where we need a foundational program which identifies and addresses each individual’s literacy needs – and then enables each learner to progress at their own level and speed. This is what led us at StepsWeb to start producing our online program and hands-on resources in the first place.

When I qualified as an educational psychologist over 25 years ago, I continued to do some tutoring alongside assessments. At that point, I was mainly tutoring older learners, including some adults. Every resource I found at the right literacy level was childish and patronising to an older learner. So I created my own, starting with hands-on resources to develop those early phonological and phonic skills with older learners.

Later, when we created our first software program, we designed it to be non age-specific. We were very aware that, in most schools, there is a huge shortage of teachers with specialist training. Even in primary schools, most of the hands-on remedial teaching is actually done by teacher aides – and at higher levels, staff and time shortages are even more acute. So we designed StepsWeb to be, in our own words, ‘the specialist approach for non-specialists’. Regardless of whether it’s used by a teacher aide, parent or class teacher with no specific literacy training, those students will automatically get the right balance of foundational and perceptual activities to achieve genuine progress.

StepsWeb is a comprehensive online literacy program which covers every level of need – from absolute beginner to advanced literacy levels. It’s designed to analyse each learner’s literacy level and place them at the correct level of the structured Course. And then, it continually analyses each learner’s errors and creates individualised reinforcement – online and printable.

For older learners, we believe that this can be transformational.

We’ve seen first-hand how students have shown significant gains, even with high-need older students. In a study with Glenfield College, we saw an average gain across Year 9 and Year 10 learners of 10 months in just 5 months – not only with reading and spelling, but also with vocabulary and comprehension².

With high-need students in Intermediate or High Schools, there is certainly a need for supporting resources and a high level of explicit teaching – and that will never change. However, students who are simply behind their peers can work relatively independently with StepsWeb, showing significant gains with as little as 30-60 minutes per week.

There’s nothing better than seeing the look on an older student’s face when they achieve another gold medal for a literacy activity they’ve done. To be honest, we never expected the medal system on StepsWeb to be particularly motivational for older students. But it makes sense when you think about it. If you’ve spent years failing at everything to do with literacy, achieving a gold medal is a big deal – and it’s a recognition of the progress many of those students have made for the very first time.

Our motto is  ‘Changing lives by improving literacy.’ Simple, yes. But a foundational approach to a problem which affects a heart-breaking number of people. And it’s never too late.  

Want to learn more about how to support older learners using StepsWeb?

Watch our webinar: Bridging the Literacy Gap - designed specifically for intermediate and high school educators.

^{1 https://www2.nzqa.govt.nz/ncea/subjects/litnum/literacy-and-numeracy-data/}

^{2 https://www.stepsweb.com/insights/case-studies/glenfield-college}