5 Research-Backed Literacy Strategies That Go Beyond Phonics

The catchall term “the science of reading” has become increasingly popular in recent years—and misunderstandings about what the approach actually entails are commonplace in the media and even in schools and classrooms. 

Yet with drastic changes to reading curricula underway in more than 40 states to more closely align instruction with the scientific evidence on how people learn to read, it’s essential that schools shore up research and classroom practice, argues Sarah Woulfin, professor of education at the University of Texas at Austin. “If you don’t have a crystal clear understanding of ‘this is what it looks like in a science-of-reading classroom,’ change and improvement isn’t going to happen,” Woulfin told Education Week. “If we want the science of reading to not just be a label on a program, we need high quality implementation.”

That expert level of understanding may still be a way off. When the EdWeek Research Center asked 1,300 educators to define the science of reading, about 13 percent connected the phrase to its key components: phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The majority of respondents, meanwhile, identified the science of reading as “general approaches” for teaching children to read, and some described it as a “marketing” term, a take we noticed reflected in several teacher Reddit threads. 

The science of reading refers to decades of research across disciplines about how kids learn reading and writing through a constellation of instructional practices and engaging strategies. Explicit and direct phonics instruction is a crucial component, for example, but Harvard education professor Nonie Lesaux says a more comprehensive understanding of the science of reading would reveal, for instance, that hours of phonics drills or worksheets aren’t what the research calls for. In fact, as a piece of the wider toolkit of strategies teachers use to teach reading—such as building background knowledge, teaching fluency through repeated and modeled reading, or pre-teaching unfamiliar vocabulary—the research suggests 20 to 30 minutes of direct phonics instruction a day is the sweet spot (though some students need more). “If you overdo it and [phonics] becomes synonymous with your reading instruction, you don't have a very engaging academic environment,” Lesaux said. 

Alongside explicit instruction in the core components of phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, and comprehension, teachers can weave together a broad (and fun!) range of research-backed strategies to scaffold the crucial skills students need to become good readers. Here are five excellent ways to support budding literacy in your classroom. 

Tap Into What Kids Know

Foundational literacy skills like phonics and phonemic awareness allow students to decode texts, but background knowledge—or students’ prior understanding of concepts and vocabulary—allows them to connect new information to what they know and make sense of it, a critical part of reading comprehension across a range of texts. 

In a 2023 study conducted by Harvard researchers, 3,000 first and second graders were introduced to a “knowledge-rich curriculum” that leaned heavily on social studies and science instruction, connecting themes such as how animals become extinct over time and the benefits of studying their bones and habitats. Rather than focusing on discrete skills like finding the main idea of texts, students read widely on a topic in order to develop “generalized schemas that can be accessed and deployed when new, but related, topics are encountered.” After the intervention, students in the study maintained more of their reading gains over the summer compared to their peers who experienced a more traditional ELA curriculum and scored 18 percent higher on science-related comprehension tests.

In the Classroom: To ramp up background knowledge, the researchers recommend taking a sustained, well-sequenced approach to content. When planning out the year, for example, instead of treating units as separate pieces, consider how topics and vocabulary link up to bigger ideas and themes, forming a cohesive roadmap through the content. So if first graders are learning about animals and habitats, connect those lessons under a broader theme, such as how living things survive. They can then read, write, and talk about related ideas—food, shelter, weather, and adaptation—across multiple weeks, building a strong foundation to draw on as they encounter new topics. Before introducing new concepts, lean on multimedia resources like photos or short videos to explain key vocabulary, link concepts to what students already know, and encourage them to draw or act out their understanding.

Make Phonics a Game, Not a Grind

Phonics is often viewed as the dry, mechanical part of reading instruction—a series of drills focused on connecting sounds to letters in isolation, according to researchers in a widely cited 2018 comprehensive review of the science of learning. But this perception misses the point: when done well, phonics instruction builds the foundation that allows children to “understand and gain experience with text” and ultimately make the move from decoding words to comprehension, the researchers note. 

In the Classroom: To inject some life into phonics—and connect instruction to other important literacy skills like pattern recognition and vocabulary—reading specialist Dian Smith is a fan of card and board games. 

For a twist on traditional Go Fish, for example, Smith creates 13 four-card sets, or 26 two-card sets, of words with shared phonics features—like short vowels, vowel digraphs, silent e, or r-controlled vowels. Students “fish” for four words that share a pattern (for example, cap, tap, map, nap for short a) or for contrasting pairs that show how one pattern changes meaning (cap and cape, hop and hope). These quick matches build students’ awareness of how small spelling changes affect pronunciation and meaning.

For Phonics Bingo, another entertaining game, each player’s board is filled with target words, and a rotating caller draws from a stack of matching word cards. As the caller reads each word aloud, students find and mark it on their boards. A short-vowel round might feature cat, bed, pig, hop, sun and an r-controlled round might include car, star, bird, corn, and turn, for example. 

Active Bodies Fuel Early Literacy 

Integrating movement into your instruction isn’t just a way to get the wiggles out, it’s also a research-backed strategy for developing crucial early literacy skills like phonemic awareness and matching letters to their corresponding sounds. 

A 2022 study of five and six year-olds found that when students practiced whole-body movements that corresponded to each letter of the alphabet—kids moved like a snake as they hissed the sibilant “sss” sound, for example—they doubled their ability to accurately recall letter-sound pairings, compared to students who merely read while sitting at their desks. 

In the Classroom: When practicing consonant-vowel-consonant words, kindergarten teacher Keri Laughlin has students tap out each sound using their fingers before blending them together, and using their arms to represent the beginning, middle, and end of a word like spin. Laughlin also incorporates Phonics in Motion, an evidence-based program that pairs each sound with a gesture—like moving your hands across a plane to pronounce rake—that engage hearing, sight, and movement all at once. “Connecting movement and letters is helpful because if you’re doing a familiar motion, you are going to create that muscle memory. Once they have that, the fluency will come,” Laughlin says.  

Former elementary teacher Linnea Lyding, meanwhile, relies on full-body exercises like push-ups, squats, and lunges to help active and reluctant readers stay focused and engaged in phonics lessons. To segment a word like ship, students might lower down and then push up slightly for each phoneme—/sh/, /i/, /p/—then blend everything together with one strong push-up to say ship! To reinforce phonological awareness skills like rhyming, students can shift their weight from left to right to mirror the onset and rhyme of words: left foot /c/, right foot /at/ for cat, for example—a small physical motion that Lyding says helps students internalize rhyme and reinforces reading’s left-to-right orientation. 

Reading Aloud to Build Fluency

Reading aloud is a time-honored elementary grade tradition, and with good reason: it’s a highly effective way to introduce students to grade-level and above text, and get them practicing the basics of comprehension. But there are small shifts that amp up the practice, research shows.

In a 2025 study, researchers at Utah State University found that fourth-graders who participated in frequent repeated read-aloud sessions—mixing teacher model reads, echo reading, choral reading, and paired reading—outperformed peers by 20 to 35 percent on measures of accuracy, speed, vocabulary, and overall reading proficiency. The findings echo a 2020 study of over 300 first graders who received repeated 30-minute read-aloud sessions involving high-quality books on topics like mammals, reptiles, and insects. After previewing key vocabulary and background knowledge, teachers paused during read-alouds to explain words that were new or difficult to understand. In small groups after the reading, students discussed, retold, and drew or wrote about what they’d read, using graphic organizers or K–W–L charts to structure their reflections. The results: students in the program nearly tripled their vocabulary gains.

Researchers in both studies concluded that well-structured read-alouds—especially with meaningful before- and after-reading activities—can help develop background knowledge, improve comprehension, and give students crucial access to grade-level or above texts that stretch them as readers. 

In the Classroom: To drive fluency, experiment with approaches like choral and echo reading and consider adding drama to the occasion: East Carolina University professor Todd Finley suggests having students read aloud with hysterical enthusiasm, dramatic hand gestures, or role play as eager students while you play a “crazy professor” to transform collective reading into a high-energy experience. Peer-based activities can be effective, too. Literacy expert and researcher Timothy Shanahan recommends pairing students up to take turns reading aloud a portion of text to each other: “one student reads a page or paragraph and the other gives feedback,” before students switch roles. Teachers can squeeze more juice out of this by pairing weaker readers with stronger readers, or by adding a comprehension component to the task, asking students to determine important themes in a passage they’ve read, discuss a compelling character, or develop a few quiz questions about the material.

Ditch Leveled Groups and Focus on Skills

On Day 1 of kindergarten, some students can tear through Elephant and Piggie books, while others can’t spell their names yet. To address disparities, teachers have long relied on leveled reading groups—pairing students with peers and texts at similar reading levels. But significant research shows these groups can widen achievement gaps and limit students’ exposure to more challenging texts.

A more effective approach: strategically group students by skill needs rather than reading level. A 2018 meta-analysis of small-group interventions found that targeting discrete skills in small group instruction—like phonemic awareness, decoding, or fluency—led to greater gains in reading achievement than focusing on comprehensive interventions that address multiple skills at once. 

In the Classroom: Each morning at Ellis Elementary in Illinois, all the early-grade students are grouped by reading skill for 45 minutes of targeted instruction. “We have five-year-olds and seven-year-olds learning side by side because that’s where they are in their reading journey,” writes instructional coach Jessica Berg in The74. Some groups focus on foundational work around letters and sounds, others take on advanced practice with multisyllabic decoding and comprehension strategies. It’s a complicated and time-consuming effort for the school, and to maximize its impact, Berg and other coaches closely monitor progress with quick assessments after each lesson. “We don’t move on if a group isn’t showing mastery,” Berg explains. “We pause. We support. And sometimes, we shift students into a group that’s a better fit.” 

The results have been dramatic: since 2021, third-grade oral reading proficiency rose by 18 percent, and the number of at-risk students dropped by 25 percent. “This model has been a game-changer for our teachers,” Berg says. “When they step into their English Language Arts block, they teach skills that every student in the room is ready for. There’s no guessing. No watering down instruction.” 

While Berg’s school went all-in on the strategy, it’s a big instructional lift. A 2022 paper underscored the benefits of skill-based groups, but also noted they “cost a lot—not in terms of money, but in terms of management and planning,” as teachers are required to interpret a variety of assessment data and then design and deliver differentiated lessons and feedback. Nonetheless, targeted group literacy instruction, the researchers conclude, can move the needle on reading: “When we work with our students in a smaller setting where we can attend to their individual needs and provide specific directions and feedback, they respond, and their reading performance improves.”