5 Support Strategies for Students Reading Below Grade Level
After over a decade of classroom experience, I recognize how hard it is to support below-grade-level readers. The goal is to ensure all your students read on grade level, but they don’t always come to the classroom that way. How do we support a seventh-grader reading at a third-grade level while still teaching content? How can we ensure we tap into our students’ interests while still tackling our required standards?
For many teachers, differentiating instruction is the answer. But how you differentiate instruction makes all the difference. Leveraging research-based strategies and practices gives students the best chance at growth—especially below-level readers. We’re sharing five strategies for students reading below grade level that you can incorporate into your differentiation plans and help them participate in appropriately challenging classroom work.
5 strategies to support below-level readers in your classroom
Frequently asked questions about supporting below-grade-level readers
Get more tips and resources to help students reading below grade level
5 strategies to support below-level readers in your classroom
Here are a few strategies and quick tips to help integrate support for below-level readers into your lessons:
1. Use multi-level readings
Research shows that when students can read a text with at least 95% accuracy, they make more significant literacy gains than they do when reading a more complex text. But, research also shows that consistently using texts at a student’s current reading level may create a situation where they never catch up to grade level. How are you supposed to navigate that conflicting advice?
You can have students re-read the same piece using multi-level texts with varying complexity levels. This gradually pushes students to grow their reading abilities by engaging with the same text again and again but still adding a way to challenge them to improve their literacy skills and reading abilities.
Newsela’s subject products offer all informational and news texts at five reading levels to help with this type of support. Below-level readers can explore the same text at their independent reading level, their frustration level, or anywhere in between.
Teachers can control the reading level for a text when they assign it to students. That means you can control how your students grow into grade-level readers and what goals you want them to hit. Assign a text at their independent reading level to help them process a text’s main idea or grow their background knowledge.
Then, after a strong first read, you can increase the reading level of the same text to help them build additional literacy skills. With each reading at a higher level, students can become more confident in their reading abilities
2. Use explicit instruction to target literacy skills
Explicit instruction is a direct, step-by-step instructional approach that shows and tells students how to do something and then checks their comprehension. Some call it the “I do, we do, you do” model because it has three clear phases:
I do: The teacher demonstrates how to do something, like learn a new skill.
We do: Students work with the teacher and each other to learn how to do what the teacher demonstrated.
You do: Students complete the task or show how to use the skill independently.
The “I do” and “we do” of explicit instruction include teaching strategies like modeling and think-alouds where teachers demonstrate target skills. Along the way, teachers use built-in formative assessments to gauge how much students are grasping the information. Based on that data, they can provide timely feedback, adjust instruction, and gradually remove scaffolds until students can work independently.
With explicit instruction, you can see exactly where your students need support and differentiate instruction to help them make the biggest gains. Newsela’s products have plenty of features to help you with explicit instruction in the classroom.
Newsela’s daily instruction and assessment product, Formative, makes it easy to create lesson-ready presentations with embedded formative assessments. For example, you might break down a text and model how to identify important supporting details in each paragraph. Then, use Formative’s 20+ different question and content types to assess student understanding. Here, you may use the multiple-choice questions in earlier paragraphs and scaffold to more open-ended questions in later sections of an article.
With real-time results, you can use the formative assessment data in the moment to adjust instruction and provide additional, targeted support.
Texts in Newsela ELA, Newsela Social Studies, and Newsela Science also have a presentation mode that lets teachers project a text without showing students teacher features, like quiz answers. They also have optional formative assessments teachers can assign with each article, including:
Embedded checks for understanding
Lessons Sparks with performance task ideas
3. Build background knowledge
Learning doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Something students learn in social studies or science class may help them understand a text in ELA and vice versa. Cross-curricular knowledge helps build background knowledge, which helps students comprehend what they read.
For example, a novel like “Crispin: The Cross of Lead” may confuse students who don’t have any background knowledge of its themes and topics. But if they’re learning about the Middle Ages in social studies, or you do lessons on Feudalism and the Plague before reading, they may better understand the novel.
Teaching students how to make text connections can help them build background knowledge. When they’re able to connect a text to a personal experience, something happening in the world, or another piece of media they’ve encountered, it’s easier to understand. It helps them activate their prior knowledge and build on it. For example, students may make connections to “Crispin: The Cross of Lead” like:
Text-to-self: “I know what it feels like to have to learn to trust someone, like Crispin did.”
Text-to-text: “I remember in the live-action ‘Beauty and the Beast’ movie, Belle saw a Plague mask when she visited France.”
Text-to-world: “The Plague in the Middle Ages was similar to the COVID-19 pandemic in the 2020s.”
Newsela’s subject products have many texts to help you build students’ background knowledge. For example, our Novel and Book Studies collection in Newsela ELA contains a variety of curated texts and videos to help students make those important text connections and increase their knowledge of a book’s topics and themes before and during reading.
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4. Incorporate multimedia resources
Incorporating multimedia resources into your lessons helps students build their language comprehension skills. These skills help them construct meaning from any form of language—written or oral. They’re critical in helping students read to learn and understand what they read. Language comprehension skills become increasingly important as students advance through school and transition from full-time learning to read, and building word recognition skills like decoding or phonological awareness.
When you add multimedia resources—like video, audio, or image content—to your lessons, you’re helping students build language comprehension skills like background knowledge, vocabulary, and verbal reasoning. Even though they’re not physically reading words on a page, they’re still getting exposure to language to improve their comprehension skills.
With Newsela products, you can provide plenty of multimedia resources to supplement students' reading at any stage of instruction, including during assessments. The Newsela content library offers videos, charts, graphs, and diagrams to supplement text. Features like read aloud mode let students listen to written content at five reading levels so they can follow along with a spoken version of the content. For assessments, Formative lets you add audio, video, or images to questions to give students multiple ways to experience the information.
5. Create more opportunities to read
Studies show that students who had caregivers read to them at home before they entered school often have better literacy skills than those who didn’t. This may mean the more familiar students are with texts and their repeated exposure to them, the better their literacy skills and interest in reading become.
Create more opportunities for students to read in groups or independently during class to give them more exposure to texts. You don’t have to limit this reading time to instruction or instructional-only materials. You can add a dedicated silent reading block to the day or make it a choice during free time activities.
A classroom library or dedicated time to visit the school library each week also adds opportunities for student choice. They get to pick books and texts on topics that interest them, increasing the likelihood of wanting to read.
You may also make more audiobooks available for students, especially those reading below grade level, during these reading opportunities. Like traditional texts, audiobooks give students access to grade-level, high-interest stories that build word knowledge, fluency, and background knowledge. Providing audiobooks of texts students read as a whole class or in small groups allows them to participate at a more grade-appropriate level in discussions with their peers while continuing to build their literacy skills.
Gamifying the experience, such as with a reading tracker or a program like Newsela’s Independent Reading Challenge, can help, too. It gives students more autonomy in choosing what they read and shows them that reading is also something to do for fun, not just for school lessons.
It’s also important to remember that reading instruction isn’t just for ELA classes. Social studies and science teachers also help students build content knowledge and literacy skills together. They may not focus on all of the skills students learn in ELA classes. But, finding ways to make text connections or teach text structures can help students build the language comprehension skills they need to improve and read at grade level.
Frequently asked questions about supporting below-grade-level readers
Want to learn more about how you can support the below-level readers in your classroom? Explore the answers to some of these frequently asked questions on the topic:
What does it mean to read on grade level?
A student’s reading level measures how well they can read a text independently. It serves as a baseline for helping them choose appropriately challenging books and content to build background knowledge and learn new literacy skills. A student’s reading level is supposed to reflect their current skills and provide room for growth.
Standardized reading assessments test students on the skills they should be able to demonstrate to read grade-level texts independently. Some skills the tests measure include:
Fluency
Comprehension
Vocabulary
Decoding
Sight recognition
Literacy knowledge
Verbal reasoning
Students who perform on par with their peers are considered to be reading at grade level. Those who perform better than their peers are considered above-grade-level readers. Those who can’t meet these standards are considered below-grade-level readers. Because this data is average and not absolute, we can consider grade-level reading in ranges rather than as individual numbers. Lexercise groups reading levels into the following ranges:
Early elementary: Grades K-3 reading level
Upper elementary: Grades 4-5 reading level
Middle school: Grades 6-8 reading level
Early secondary: Grades 9-10 reading level
Upper secondary: Grades 11-12 reading level
Why don’t all students read on grade level?
There are many reasons—or combinations of reasons—a student might read below grade level, some of which include:
Struggling to learn word recognition skills like phonological awareness, decoding, or sight recognition.
Lacking the background knowledge to understand grade-level concepts in text.
Having a limited vocabulary.
Lacking foundational language comprehension skills like literacy knowledge, language structures, or verbal reasoning.
Lacking proper instructional support for learning or physical disabilities.
Learning English as a second language alongside gaining grade-level content knowledge.
Having knowledge and skill gaps from inadequate earlier reading instruction, such as a lack of decoding skills.
Being disinterested in reading because they haven’t found books or content that they enjoy.
How can I figure out why my students aren’t reading on grade level?
It’s helpful to know which factors influence your students’ below-grade-level reading. That way, you can choose the right strategies to support their growth. In some cases, students with physical or learning disabilities may have an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) or similar document that outlines their needs or accommodations.
For students without an IEP or growth plan, identifying the factors contributing to below-grade-level reading may be trickier. There are a few things you can try to learn the information you need:
Discuss students’ reading habits with caregivers at parent-teacher conferences to see how students read at home.
Talk to students’ former teachers in your school or district to learn more about their reading and literacy skills performance.
Look at students’ past ELA standardized test scores and common assessments and try to identify areas for improvement with word recognition or language comprehension skills.
Create opportunities for formative assessment to test students' word recognition or language comprehension to identify areas of improvement.
Watch students’ in-class behavior when they’re reading to get an in-the-moment assessment of their performance and abilities.
These assessments and resources may help you uncover why certain students struggle with grade-level reading so you can create plans to help them improve.
Get more tips and resources to help students reading below grade level
Helping your students develop literacy skills is essential to their academic growth and success. Learning how and when to provide research-backed support is a way to push all learners to achieve their educational goals. Do you have other helpful strategies you use to ensure the success of your below-grade-level readers? Share them with us in the Newsela Community on Facebook.