A significant proportion of adolescents are not meeting basic bench marks for reading and spelling and this has not only long-term implications in terms of acquiring jobs and participating fully in society, but is also detrimental in the short-term impacting on students’ self-confidence and their ability to complete classroom tasks.
As well-respected academic Louise Moats notes, older readers can acquire the skills they missed out on in the primary grades through intensive reading intervention programs which teach speech sounds (phonology), the print system (orthography), speech-to-print correspondences (phonics), word meanings (semantics), sentence structure (syntax), and text organization (discourse).
All of these elements are systematically and explicitly taught in the Cracking the ABC Code reading and spelling programs in a structure that respects the student’s age and social, emotional and intellectual needs.[divider]