Many intelligent, young people remain unaware of the inadequacy of their literacy skills or are able to conceal the difficulties whilst they do not experience any academic problems. This situation can change rapidly at the secondary school stage, but sometimes it will not be until they are taking advanced courses that the problems begin to emerge, their high intelligence and good visual memories having acted as a mask up to that point. Once they have to do much more reading; write extensively using more specialised words; deal with the organisation necessary for writing essays and face a large amount of work under time pressure, they will inevitably find it difficult to cope. Researchers in Oxford pointed to the existence of ...a group of pupils whose academic problems only began to show once they have reached their teens. The scientists hypothesised that these were children who had learned to read by looking and guessing without having the ability to sound out unfamiliar words.'(Robertson. p163)

If your child is already at the secondary stage it will be more difficult to undo the damage from faulty reading instruction. 'Older poor readers have the same basic problems as younger poor readers and need to learn the same skills.Their problems, however, are complicated by years of frustration and failure' (Hall/Moats p213) They will suffer from 'The Matthew Effect', from the biblical verse in St. Matthew 25:29: "For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath", which can be summarized as, "The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer." Early development of reading skills leads to faster rates of skill improvement with the result that the disparity between more skilled and less skilled readers widens over time. www.balancedreading.com/matthew.html

Ignore anyone who suggests that your child will have been 'phonicked up to their eyeballs' by this stage and that they now need 'something completely different' i.e. whole word tuition with emphasis on 'visual strategies'. If your son/daughter has received any remedial instruction in school it is extremely unlikely to have been a programme that followed the synthetic phonic principles. The vast majority of the intervention (Wave 2/3) programmes presently used in schools are an ineffective mixture of whole-language and analytic phonics-see 'What not to do'. Reassure your teenager that there is nothing wrong with their brain and they certainly aren't 'stupid', 'thick', or any other derogatory label they may have stuck on themselves. With hard work, good teaching and a suitable synthetic phonics programme they CAN learn how to read.

Down to practicalities; if you are the desperate parent of an unhappy teenager struggling with reading and spelling and you want to do something effective about it (assuming that your teenager is willing) then, first, assess your teenager's reading, spelling and alphabet code knowledge -use the free tests in Resources 2. Experience shows that the vast majority of poor readers have big gaps in their knowledge of the alphabet code, especially the advanced code. In addition, if they haven't given up completely, most older, struggling readers are prone to guessing whilst reading. This 'bad habit' is, unfortunately, the result of past teaching methods (see- mixed methods) and must be stopped. All reading material whilst they are undergoing remediation should be completely decodable to avoid any further guessing or memorising. An intensive, reading programme given one-to-one, which explicitly teaches the complete alphabet code along with the skills of sounding out, blending and segmenting, is likely to be necessary. You may decide to take this on yourself: use a programme suitable for older children/teenagers, marked XXX from Resources10. If the task seems overwhelming then a remedial reading tutor who uses a synthetic phonic programme may be the answer - see Choosing a remedial tutor

http://leo.oise.utoronto.ca/~kstanovich/pdfs/reading/RRQ86.pdf Stanovich: Matthew Effects in Reading.

www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/spring_sum98/greene.pdf Another Chance: Using synthetic phonics with older students (pdf)

www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/fall04/latebloomers.htm Waiting Rarely Works.

www.societyforqualityeducation.org/newsletter/archives/words.pdf Hempenstall -Older students' reading problems

www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=000CB565-F330-11BE-AD0683414B7F0000 The Self-Esteem Myth.

www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CA647.htm Can't read, won't read

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/education/article4362974.ece Phil Beadle: Adult literacy is a 'school for scandal'

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