Striving and Struggling Readers: Bridging the Terminology Divide
- Jun 15
- 13 min read
Updated: Jun 16
This post kicks off our summer series! Here we will tease out the differences between striving and struggling readers and explore whether these terms can be used to describe students’ instructional needs. The first post examines how each term is used, how these terms are becoming interchangeable, and what this means for discussions of student performance. Then, we present a case for using the terms striving and struggling to differentiate between two types of dysfluent readers at different points in their reading development. Finally, we propose a description of reading behaviors that teachers can use to conceptualize students as either struggling, striving, or thriving readers. Mid-summer posts will expand on how each group’s behaviors align with Ehri’s phases of reading development and screening data patterns. The last segment in the series will describe how teachers could use these groupings to plan instruction.
We hope that this series encourages you to reflect on students’ reading growth, in terms of who made progress and why. Hopefully, the ideas we discuss will serve as an additional tool for understanding the literacy needs of your students next year.
Types of Readers
Do you refer to students who read dysfluently as struggling or striving readers? Traditionally these students have been referred to as struggling, which reflects how effortful reading is for them. For example, in Teaching Phonemic Awareness: An Educators’ Guide (Ashby et al., 2024), the term struggling reader refers specifically to students in Grade 2 and beyond who require intervention support for reading. By Grade 2 most students should be well on their way to fluent reading. Imagine an interventionist who observes that her third-grade student struggles to read text, write some letters, learn phonics patterns, and spell. This student is having unusual difficulty learning to read and write, hence the term struggling reader.
Additionally, the term struggling reader can apply to novice readers who are working hard to use their new decoding skills to read stories. In this case, their reading is developing on track with most peers. Their “struggle” is the one all humans experience when first learning a complex skill. They concentrate on bringing all the different parts together and perform the new skill slowly at first. This deliberate and accurate phase is a normal and crucial part of skill acquisition (Burns, 2023). For example, a teacher may observe that most of her students are struggling as they read decodable stories slowly and effortfully in the fall of first grade. Novice readers can be seen hunching over their page, index fingers white with pressure, decoding laboriously. Surely, these are struggling readers as well.
This, in essence, is the problem. The term struggling reader is ambiguous; it can describe either K-2 typically developing readers or older students who have difficulty learning to read. Words with multiple meanings enrich our reading of fiction and poetry. However, multiple meanings can entangle our professional conversations, leading to miscommunication. Currently, term struggling is widely used as an umbrella term to describe any student who is not yet reading fluently. We question whether this broad use of struggling can support effective instructional planning for students who have different amounts of reading experience and different foundational skill gaps.
Now, let’s look at the history of the term striving readers. This term was popularized by the federal government’s Striving Readers grants, which focused on adolescents who were behind in reading (Loadman et al., 2010; Garet et al., 2024). Aside from these grants, the term striving readers is rarely used in the reading literature (c.f., Burns et al., 2023; Downs et al., 2026). Recently, the everyday usage of the term striving readers has migrated from its origins in adolescent literacy. As far as we can tell, this more general use of the term striving readers traces back to the balanced literacy community (Harvey & Ward, 2017).
Some educators note that striving readers is a more strength-based term for students who are not learning to read as easily as their peers, and that the more traditional term struggling readers should be abandoned. Although traditionalists can appreciate the strength-based nature of the term striving readers, some also wonder if that positivity obscures the challenges that poor readers experience as they literally struggle to get through each school day.
Whatever position you take, using the term striving or struggling to refer to all students with dysfluent reading may muddle our pedagogical conversations. It is tough to plan instruction that “meets students where they are” when our terminology does not clearly differentiate between dysfluent readers who are typical, novice readers in K- 2 and older students who lack foundational skills.
Repurposing the Terms for Greater Precision
Whether your preference is struggling or striving, does it really make sense to use the same word to describe any student who reads laboriously? Or could the term striving reader be adapted to carry a specific meaning that increases the precision of instructional conversations and the clarity of instructional decision-making? By repurposing these terms, our professional language will better reflect where students are in their reading development and what instruction will move them forward most effectively.
Let’s consider how using the terms striving and struggling to refer to groups with distinct reading behaviors could lead to a more accurate understanding of your students’ reading strengths and instructional goals. We want to be clear that what follows is simply a proposal for changing our language. It is not yet research-validated, although it is aligned with research on the phases of reading development. The proposal offers an opportunity to distinguish currently overlapping terms so that educators can describe a student’s reading progress with greater clarity.
What does it mean to be Struggling?
The term struggling reader could refer to students who are not yet confidently reading decodable words accurately and whose invented spellings have missing sounds or extra sounds. These students frequently misread unfamiliar decodable words, especially when they appear in lists without context. Their reading might seem to improve when they read simple stories with pictures, if they are using context or background knowledge to guess the words. These struggling readers are not prioritizing letter information when they read new words, and they are less likely to store new words in memory for permanent access (Adams, 1990; Hudson et al., 2008).
Using multiple cues to identify words is laborious, but it may work well enough when reading stories in the early elementary grades. Many curriculums expect students to rely on reading to learn new information by 4th grade. When reading about an unfamiliar topic, context is less helpful and background information is lacking. This leaves struggling readers with only inaccurate decoding skills to support word identification. Although most of the multisyllabic words in English are decodable, students with inadequate decoding skills cannot identify these words independently. In many cases, they misread news words as familiar words (e.g., misreading consistent as “content”). This, in turn, can interfere with comprehension and limit vocabulary growth across the lifespan.
Struggling readers are extremely challenged by text when the topic is unfamiliar; they may be quickly locked out of even a simple passage. They read inaccurately, making up content as they go along. For these readers, misreading one word will often lead to a cascade of errors. They can anticipate what a simple text might say but cannot use the print to read what the text actually says. When the text is basic, as in K-1, their “little” errors may not seem significant, especially if the overall gist is preserved. Yet most errors do eventually interfere with comprehension. For example, students who miss verb tense markers like -ed and -s may have difficulty understanding a timeline of unfamiliar events as they read.
Struggling readers usually require more practice with foundational skills that support the application of phonics patterns to reading and spelling. Confident letter recognition, phonemic awareness, and familiarity with the alphabetic principle are key foundational skills that pave the way for students to decode accurately. Without a strong foundation, some may learn isolated letter-sound relationships but will not consistently apply that phonics knowledge to read or spell new words. Others will have difficulty learning phonics patterns. These struggling readers learn new phonics patterns best when they practice reading and spelling these patterns each day.
We propose using the term struggling reader to describe the student who uses information from some letters in a word, context, and background knowledge to guess at words. Students who cannot decode words accurately from left to right. These struggling readers perform similarly to students in Ehri’s partial alphabetic phase of reading development (Ehri & McCormick, 1998; Ehri, 2005; Ehri, 2020).
What does it mean to be Striving?
The term striving reader could refer to students who can read accurately and can spell words as they sound. They have learned the phonics patterns taught for reading and spelling. Reading aloud may still be a challenge for them; they may read awkwardly with an uneven pace that disregards punctuation and has little intonation. These are the typical characteristics of novice readers who are focusing their full attention on sounding out words and who have little capacity to attend to other text features like punctuation (Perfetti & Hart, 2002). Although it is effortful, striving readers are prioritizing letter information to read new words independently. For example, when they misread the occasional word, they are more likely to read it as one with similar letters (e.g., reading list as last) (Miles & Ehri, 2019; Marsh et al., 1981). As they practice spelling by sound, they solidify letter-sound connections that support faster decoding and spelling.
According to this proposed definition, a striving reader is a reader who, with continued instruction and ample opportunity to practice reading and writing, will not remain a striving reader for long. They will maintain accuracy as they learn more complex phonics patterns and will, in time, develop smooth reading with appropriate intonation.
At this point, let’s take a moment to clarify what we mean by accurate. For this discussion, a word is read accurately if it is read correctly on the first attempt with its sounds blended together. Words that are self-corrected, or sounded out aloud before being blended, do not count as accurate for this purpose. In the schema proposed here, any student who is not decoding accurately would be considered a struggling reader.
Striving readers who can consistently apply the alphabetic principle to read unfamiliar words can begin teaching themselves new words as they read. When they can decode a new word more easily, they can orthographically map it to store it in memory so it can be recognized more quickly the next time (Ehri, 2014; Li & Wang, 2023; Pritchard et al., 2018). Eventually, the spelling, sound, and meaning become fused into an instantly recognized word form (Perfetti, 2007). Accurate decoding is a key skill in this process of word storage. With continued structured literacy instruction and plenty of practice, most striving readers will become confident decoders and fluent readers in time.
We propose using the term striving reader to describe the student who decodes words from left to right. Striving readers are accurate readers who are reading slowly. Consistently accurate reading of new decodable words (including multi-syllabic words) indicates that they have mastered foundation skills like letter knowledge, phonemic awareness, and the alphabetic principle. Further, they have integrated these skills with a knowledge of phonics patterns to read unfamiliar words independently. These striving readers perform similarly to students in the full alphabetic phase of Ehri’s phases of reading development (Ehri & McCormick, 1998; Ehri, 2005; Ehri, 2020).
Moving Towards a New Understanding
According to the proposed conceptualization of struggling and striving readers, accurate decoding is the main behavior that differentiates these two groups. Struggling readers can be easy to overlook, especially in the early grades. They may be highly engaged and eager to learn, or they may be easily distracted. They may be highly verbal, or they may have less developed oral language skills. They may be multi-lingual learners or native English speakers. They may recognize many printed words instantly or recognize only a very small number of words instantly. They may be first graders who are new to reading, or adolescent readers who have a basic sight word vocabulary but cannot sound out longer, less common words. Any of these characteristics might influence how well a student appears to be “reading” at a given point in their education. Struggling readers who have other learning challenges may be easier to recognize. Struggling readers who bring other learning strengths may escape notice for years. Yet their strengths will not compensate for inaccurate decoding (Hoover & Gough, 1990). Inaccurate decoding will continue to interfere with vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension throughout the lifespan (Shaywitz & Fletcher, 1999).
Accurate decoding may very well be the cornerstone skill of learning to read. It is essential for self-teaching and orthographic mapping, allowing students to identify many new words independently and begin storing them for instant recognition (Ehri, 2020; Share, 1995). Accurate decoding allows students to notice new vocabulary words when reading. If a new word is not decoded accurately, the reader does not store its correct spelling in memory. Over time, inaccurate readers read less and store fewer words in memory. This plays into the Matthew effect in reading, where students who read more make greater gains than those who don’t; the “rich” students get richer while the “poor” get left behind (Stanovich, 1986). Any student who is not yet decoding accurately should receive continued reading instruction to support their progress in becoming an accurate reader with words, sentences, and passages.
In addition to struggling readers and striving readers, it is important for teachers to consider a third group of students; thriving readers. When readers are thriving, they read fluently. They recognize most words instantly, decode new words confidently, read with appropriate intonation, and understand the intended meaning of the text. When all of this is happening as it should, reading feels easy. The ease of reading allows students to read for longer periods without tiring. It also frees up precious cognitive resources for comprehension (Garcia & Cain, 2023; Perfetti & Stafura, 2014). Thriving readers perform similarly to students in Ehri’s consolidated phase of reading development (Ehri & McCormick, 1998; Ehri, 2005; Ehri, 2020).
The table below organizes key observable differences in the reading behaviors of struggling, striving, and thriving readers. Research has established that using schema such as this can help organize our knowledge of complex topics, such as reading, into a condensed form that is easy to remember, retrieve, and apply (Alloway & Gathercole, 2008). Our proposal captures how each group of readers tends to perform in three dimensions of reading behavior: accuracy, pacing, and prosody.
Struggling readers can read some familiar words in passages, but they rarely read new words accurately. They rely on picture cues and context to supplement incomplete letter information, and sometimes they guess words correctly. Struggling readers may rush to guess a word or, alternatively, pause for a long while as they try to identify the word based on the sentence context. When the topic is unfamiliar or the text has few pictures, their reading often loses its rhythm and intonation.
Striving readers can consistently apply decoding skills to read new words in passages and in lists. They may pause often to decode words “in their heads” before saying them out loud. Initially, their focus on decoding can make reading sound choppy. Thriving readers are confident in their decoding. They read new words with ease while maintaining their reading pace and intonation.
Summary
To summarize, the terms thriving, striving, and struggling could be used to describe students in every grade who are at different places in their literacy journey. Thriving readers enjoy reading lengthy passages, and their instant word recognition seems to grow by leaps and bounds. Striving readers may be glued to the page and labor to read text, but they can apply phonics patterns to read new words and to spell words like they sound. In other words, the striving readers are striving to transfer the word-level skills they’ve learned to read and comprehend text. Struggling readers, on the other hand, have difficulty decoding text accurately and lack foundational skills.
The terms thriving, striving, and struggling may be helpful as you consider the reading performance of your students. Think it over and stay tuned for the rest of the series!
-- Jane Ashby, Dae Selcer, and The PEARS Team
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