It’s Not Too Late: Teaching a High School Student to Read From the Ground Up

In November of 2024, I started working with a high school sophomore who was functionally illiterate. Her reading accuracy was below 50%. She read at about 35 words per minute and tested in the 1st percentile in foundational skills and reading comprehension. Her reading was broken, choppy, flat, and void of expression. Like many students in her position, she had developed an incredibly sophisticated compensation strategy: she used context to guess. She could produce something that sounded close enough to pass in some classrooms, but she wasn’t actually reading the words on the page. She couldn’t decode.

I often think about how that must have felt, to move through school, through the world, without full access to written language. The exhaustion. The embarrassment. The constant guessing. And the reality is: she had made it to 10th grade this way.

Starting at the True Beginning

We began with the PAST (Phonological Awareness Screening Test) and quickly uncovered significant gaps in phonological awareness, the foundational ability to hear and manipulate sounds in spoken language.

So we started there. Every day, we practiced isolating sounds, blending sounds, deleting and manipulating phonemes. Before we ever expected her to read words, we made sure she could hear them.

It makes me think of the beautiful visual in Daryl Seitchik’s “How We Read: A Graphic Guide to Literacy” where he describes the symbiotic role between the visual and auditory cortex.

Next we brought in letter tiles to connect speech to print. She began identifying the sounds she heard and mapping them to letters, physically building words. We started with simple, one-syllable CVC words and slowly worked our way up to more complex patterns.

From there, I explicitly taught the six syllable types, and we moved into decoding two-syllable words through a syllabication routine. At the same time, we did daily oral reading fluency work. But I’ll be honest: I didn’t care much about speed, at least not at first. Accuracy was everything.

We worked relentlessly to break the habit of guessing. No more approximations. No more “close enough.” She had to look at every part of every word. And slowly, just like the research tells us, her accuracy began to improve. Because when students are taught sound-symbol correspondence in a systematic and explicit way, they learn to read. Yes, even at 15.

The Part No Program Can Script

What no assessment or curriculum can fully capture is the role of trust. When I met this student, her walls were sky-high. Letting someone see her struggle with reading was deeply vulnerable. And honestly, behind the scenes, I was overwhelmed. I was angry at the system that had failed her. I was also unsure.

As a former high school English teacher turned literacy specialist, I was still learning. Teaching foundational reading skills, the kind typically introduced in Pre-K and Kindergarten, was new territory for me. And the gaps? They were extensive. I wasn’t optimistic at first.

But I knew this: if I didn’t intervene, it was unlikely anyone else would. At 15, this felt like her last real shot. So we built a relationship first. Every day started with a check-in, just talking about life. At first, I got one-word answers. Over time, those turned into sentences. Then conversations.

She told me she loved crafting and food. So we made a deal: every time she passed a level of the PAST, she earned a reward, something creative or something delicious. One reward was a teacher salad from the lunch room. Another one of her rewards was an old book I acquired from the local recycling center that she used to make a cutout like this:

Was she fully bought into literacy instruction at that point? Not exactly. But she was showing up. And that mattered.

Building Momentum

After phonemic awareness, we moved into Word Connections (a free program developed by Dr. Jessica Toste and her team at UT Austin). Through this, her skills in Word reading, Morphology, and Sentence reading began to grow, and so did her confidence.

By the end of the year, her FastBridge data showed strong gains in foundational skills. But her fluency still lagged. In reading comprehension, she jumped from the 6th percentile to 20th, but I knew she was capable of more growth. So at the start of the 2025–2026 school year, I raised the bar.

We added: Repeated reading of grade-level text for fluency, Spellography (Louisa Moats) for deeper spelling, and a self-selected high school novel.

She chose a quintessential teenage drama, full of angst, complex sentences and even more complex characters; it was everything that would have been inaccessible to her just months before.

Our daily routine became: Oral reading fluency practice, Spellography, Reading the novel aloud together paired with comprehension strategies: Retrieval practice, Brain dumps, Gist summarization, Academic discussion.

This combination mattered. She wasn’t just being remediated, she was being honored as a high school student. She was doing the hard foundational work and engaging with age-appropriate, meaningful text.

The Moment Everything Shifted

Her growth this year has been nothing short of extraordinary. She went from 63 words correct per minute to over 100, with 96% accuracy. The day she broke 100, we both cried.

Because it wasn’t just a number. It was proof. Proof that she could do something she had been implicitly told by years of experience that she couldn’t.

The Bookshelf

At the beginning of the year, I had each of my students create a visual of their reading journey: past, present, and future.

In her “past,” she drew her early experiences—feeling dumb, feeling small, being made to feel like a young child because of what she couldn’t do. Her “present” showed growth.

But it was her “future” that I can’t stop thinking about. She drew a house. Inside it was a bookshelf full of books. Books she had read.

She told me she had never read a full novel before (outside of children’s books). But someday, she wanted a shelf filled with books she had completed, each one a marker of something she accomplished. Not a career goal. Not money. Just books.

A life of literacy she had never believed was available to her. What she drew wasn’t just a bookshelf. It was dignity. Ownership. Identity.

Where She Is Now

She’s now a junior, and we’re more than halfway through her novel. Her reading is more fluent, more expressive, and largely accurate—even with multisyllabic words. A byproduct of focusing on these foundational skills is continued growth in her ability to understand what she’s reading. Now, she’s in the 35th percentile for reading comprehension, largely because she can decode and read at a pace that allows the cognitive load to shift to the text’s meaning. She shows up every day committed to that future she envisioned.

She still has a long way to go. Her learning challenges haven’t disappeared. But something more important has changed: She believes she can learn.

She participates more. She shares her thoughts. She holds her head higher. And that changes everything.

A Call to Action

Working with this student has been one of the most challenging, and most rewarding experiences of my career. And here’s what I want educators to hear: If the system fails students to read in early grades, the problem doesn’t go away. It follows them into middle school. High school. Adulthood.

But here’s the truth we don’t say loudly enough: It is not too late.

There is a roadmap: Phonological awareness, Explicit phonics, Structured, systematic instruction, Fluency practice, Grade-level application, Relationship and trust.

Struggling adolescent readers don’t need different reading processes. They need access to the same evidence-based instruction delivered with urgency, respect, and belief. Because behind every older struggling reader is a student who has been surviving without access to something fundamental. And when we finally give them that access?

We don’t just teach them to read. We change what they believe is possible for their lives.