Laureate Professor Anne Castles leads new research into high school literacy

When they get to high school, the problem only gets worse.

This year's Naplan results showed 30 per cent of year 7 students in Australia were below the reading level they should be at, with 21 per cent in the "developing" category and 9 per cent in the "needs additional support" category.

An even larger proportion of year 9 students were behind in reading with 35.3 per cent in the lowest two achievement levels.

In 2018, 40 per cent of Australian 15-year-olds fell below the national proficient standard of reading on the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).

Professor Anne Castles has been granted more than $3 million from the Australian Research Council to investigate exactly why high schoolers struggle to read, how to assess their reading abilities and what interventions really work to improve their literacy.

She is one of the star recruits of the Australian Catholic University's new Australian Centre for the Advancement of Literacy.

Professor Castles said while there was plenty of research on literacy instruction at a primary school level, there was very little research in the high school context.

"Once you get to high school, there's kind of an assumption that children are already there with their basic reading, and it's that move from learning to read, to reading to learn," she said.

"But the fact is for a lot of children coming into high school, especially if they come from disadvantaged or non-English speaking backgrounds, the basic functional literacy just is not there."

She said there weren't many targeted, evidence-based assessments to find out what problems struggling adolescent readers face. Naplan is a good, broad literacy assessment but it doesn't give the fine-grain detail of how a student reads a text.

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Professor Castles's team will also examine other factors that interact with literacy in adolescents, such as their motivation to read, their self esteem and their use of digital devices.

Research by ACU colleague Professor Genevieve McArthur showed poor literacy could lead to low academic self-esteem.

"That leads to real discomfort for them if they're, for example, asked to read aloud in class, which I think is often done even in high school with things like trying to read really difficult texts like Shakespeare novels," Professor Castles said.

She said there was a misconception that students had different learning styles and that there was no one-size-fits all method.

"Our research suggests if we can pin down the problem, then we tend to know the best way to intervene for that problem, and it's not a lucky dip where you pull out different methods and see which one works for that child. That's probably wasting precious time when we have the science in on how best to intervene for those problems," Professor Castles said.

"Some of these children from disadvantaged backgrounds, they may be not getting the language support at home that other children are getting.

"They may need extra intervention at that level to get them in the right place to be reading well, but there's absolutely no reason why they can't do that."

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