Evidence-based early literacy curricula are thriving in elementary classrooms. According to a recent SRI Education study that examined foundational skills in four urban districts, between 88% and 94% of over 200 teachers surveyed reported that they used their foundational skills curriculum daily or almost daily.
In addition, observations of classroom instruction confirmed that the 112 foundational skills lessons researchers viewed were focused, aligned, and explicit in their instruction.
However, the researchers noted that something critical was often missing from those same lessons: the opportunity to connect sounds and words to meaning. That translates into large numbers of students meeting the literacy benchmarks for foundational skills on early literacy screening assessments, but, by the third and fourth grades, when they’re expected to make meaning from more complex texts on state literacy assessments, many can’t meet the mark.
This isn’t just something inherent to these four districts; it mirrors national trends. Recent research that evaluated early literacy assessments indicated that while 56% of K–2 students were “on track” for learning to read, only 31% of fourth graders scored at or above the proficient level on the 2024 NAEP reading assessment, a test that measures students’ ability to comprehend with greater depth.
The researchers found that only about one in five lessons gave students the opportunity to apply their phonics knowledge beyond single words to connected text: sentences, passages, or stories that help build reading fluency. And in more than half of lessons, teachers addressed word meaning just once or not at all.
What this means is that students are learning how to blend sounds, but they’re not consistently given the opportunity to make sense of them. The connections between decoding and meaning are often missing.
The researchers propose bridging processes; these are mechanisms that connect word recognition and language comprehension, and teachers can incorporate them into existing word recognition or phonics instruction, allowing students to build more meaning as they learn to decode.
Two key bridging processes are vocabulary knowledge—the understanding of the meanings of words—and reading fluency—the ability to read connected text accurately and smoothly.
An example of this kind of instruction would be to discuss long “ai” words, like sail, and bait, then show a picture of a sailboat and construct a sentence using the word “sail” in context. Students could also work together to come up with their own sentences to reinforce the concept.
Fluency only develops through practice with connected text; otherwise, students struggle to make the jump from decoding single words to understanding longer texts.
Implementing such important instruction shouldn’t rest only on the teachers. District and school leaders must help align existing tools with bridging processes to expand the view of what reading development should be and provide professional learning opportunities for teachers to show them how to incorporate vocabulary and fluency practice into their phonics instruction.
We’ve started down the right path with current phonics and decoding instruction. We just need to take the next step to connect word reading with word meaning to make the system more robust.
Source:
Jennerjohn, A., Rutherford-Quach, S., Cassidy., L., Woodworth, K., Dec, S., Reynolds, D. (2026). Bridging the divide: Connecting word recognition and language comprehension in early literacy [Learning brief]. SRI. Accessed through https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/opinion-decoding-not-enough-connecting-103000728.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAACbA9pXPnnjgOzs_LqywSsHf8N5H1UxH9lGjYYFy5uLgzDpuuI1rNU9e5zgmZ8C2yUa36U8mZpe_fI-bBaT_C39IkEid5L2RXSwcRltMXaAkyHmdy-kfN7x8aWZAeU0Vi6jBq50noW1lPWg0-fdJ7-S2gieUzhFoKcyufhvGdpn8
