Editor's Note: This article is adapted from our live webinar, "Why Do Some Students with Strong Decoding Skills Still Have Trouble Comprehending Texts?" featuring Dr. Kelly Cartwright, professor and reading researcher at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
💡 Want to watch the full discussion? Access the on-demand webinar recording here.
Decoding does not guarantee comprehension, and for about 20 to 30% of readers who need comprehension support, the next step is not more phonics. It is a set of invisible thinking skills that researchers call executive skills, and the good news from the session is that they can be taught.
- Roughly 20 to 30% of readers who need comprehension support have strong word reading paired with comprehension that has not caught up, a profile researchers call reading comprehension difficulties, or RCD.
- More phonics will not close this gap. These students already decode at or above grade level, so instruction has to target something other than word recognition.
- Executive skills are the missing layer: planning, organization, cognitive flexibility, inhibition, and working memory are the mental skills that manage everything a reader juggles at once.
- Executive skills predict long-term outcomes, including kindergarten literacy, third grade reading comprehension, reading and math achievement at age 21, and college completion by age 25.
- The instructional move is always the same: make invisible thinking visible with concrete supports, and comprehension improves.
- High quality decodables give students a place to practice managing decoding and meaning at the same time, rather than one at the expense of the other.
Why doesn't strong decoding lead to strong comprehension?
Because reading was never one process. As Dr. Cartwright framed it in the session, literacy is massive, like an iceberg. What you see on the surface is a child reading aloud. What sits below the surface is phonemic awareness, phonics knowledge, decoding strategies, fluency with expression, vocabulary breadth and depth, oral language comprehension, morphology, syntax, text structure, and every comprehension strategy you have ever taught.
Richard Wagner of the Florida Center for Reading Research puts the goal plainly: the only purpose for reading is to comprehend the author's message. For a long time, people assumed that once a reader could lift the words off the page, comprehension would follow automatically.
That turned out not to be the case. As Dr. Cartwright said during the webinar, just because you can sound out the words doesn't mean the comprehension fairy comes along and waves a wand. Comprehension has to be taught too.
"Reading is not just one process. It's the ability to manage all of these processes at once."
Dr. Kelly CartwrightHow do I tell a word reading need from a comprehension need?
Look at the constellation of scores, not one score at a time. During the session, Dr. Cartwright walked through a set of sample third grade data and asked participants to spot the students who needed something other than phonics. The contrast was immediate.
Charles: a word reading profile
His reading rate is below the grade level benchmark and his word decoding sits at a second grade level in September of third grade. His comprehension is low because the words are not coming off the page. What he needs is explicit, systematic phonics instruction, guided by a phonics screener that pinpoints exactly what he is missing, whether that is vowel teams, digraphs, or something else.
What are executive skills, and why do they matter for reading?
Executive skills are the mental skills we use to manage our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to achieve goals. Dr. Cartwright's analogy is a CEO: we are chief executive officers of our own brains.
Her everyday example is a grocery run. Your list helps you plan what you are getting and organize it by aisle. It supports your memory. It has you shifting flexibly between the list and the shelves. And it helps you inhibit the impulse to grab the seasonal cookies on the end cap.
Three core executive skills act as building blocks: working memory, which holds information in mind while processing something else; cognitive flexibility, which shifts between ideas and tasks; and inhibition, which resists impulses and ignores what is irrelevant.
Executive skills are what let a reader hold the meaning of a text in mind while running decoding strategies through a word. Consider reading ship: you hold /sh/ in mind while your eyes reach the i, hold /sh/ /i/ while you reach the p, then blend all three. As Dr. Cartwright pointed out, that is a lot, and it is happening while the reader is also supposed to be tracking meaning.
The research she shared connects these skills to outcomes across the lifespan. Early executive skills predict growth in emergent literacy, kindergarten literacy, third grade reading comprehension, reading and math achievement at age 21, and college completion by age 25.
Isn't the simple view of reading enough to guide instruction?
Recent science suggests the picture is more complex. Word recognition and language comprehension are not entirely separate buckets. They overlap and interact. Morphology is the clearest example: it involves letters, sounds, and meanings all at once, and it contributes to word recognition, comprehension, and vocabulary together.
The second shift is just as important. Readers are not passive recipients of instruction. They are active, self-regulated learners who do things to drive word recognition and language comprehension, and who have to coordinate the bridge between them. When those self-regulatory skills are still developing, the whole system is harder to manage.
How do I teach executive skills inside reading instruction?
You scaffold them, the same way you scaffold anything else that is not yet strong. The difference is that these skills are invisible, so the scaffold has to make the thinking concrete. Dr. Cartwright's phrase throughout the session was putting the thinking on the table.
That starts with explicit teacher talk about what good readers do: good readers are good planners, organized thinkers, and flexible thinkers, they have good memories, and they are good at ignoring what is not important to understanding. Then you give students something they can see and touch for each skill.
Plan the read before the reading starts
Use a planning tool that begins with a goal, such as reading to get information about tornadoes. From there, students preview the book, check the table of contents to decide where to slow down, connect to what they already know, ask a goal-related question, make a prediction, choose a strategy such as notes or sticky notes, and reflect on what they will know when they are done.
When students get explicit, concrete support for planful, goal-directed reading, their comprehension improves.Put language organization on the table
Language is an organized system at every level, and these students often have not yet noticed it. Start the day with a scrambled sentence, which also works as an informal assessment. If students need more support, use a word-grouping activity built around the action word as the pivot: who did it goes before the action, how they did it goes just before the action, to whom or what goes after, and where goes at the end.
Students with RCD who received this intervention improved in reading comprehension.Make story structure and connecting words explicit
Narrative events are connected by cause and effect, and students with an RCD profile often retell stories as a string of events joined by "and," without the causal links that hold the story together. Use story maps with a guiding question set, and teach connecting words directly, so a student completing "Sharon got wet ___ she forgot her umbrella" reaches for "because" instead of "and." Teach expository text structures the same visual way.
Teaching expository structures improves comprehension of informational text, and the gains transfer to narrative text.Build flexibility between sounds and meanings
Take 12 words that can be sorted two ways, by sound and by meaning, such as six clothing items and six cleaning supplies that also split into two sound groups. Have students sort by meaning, then reshuffle and sort by sound, then place three cards in a two-by-two grid and ask what word belongs in the empty cell. Repeat until they get four in a row correct.
Five lessons, five sets of words, five days: comprehension improves because students can now shift flexibly between sound and meaning.Teach students to inhibit the wrong meaning
Academic language demands that students suppress a familiar meaning to access a specialized one. A sentence in language arts starts with a capital and ends with punctuation, but a number sentence is something else entirely, and the sum of your cookies means all of them, not some of them. Teach homonyms and homophones, then idioms and figures of speech, then ambiguous sentences, then have students write their own riddles.
Lesson sequences like these have been shown to improve reading comprehension.Stabilize working memory with visible connections
Authors take shortcuts, and students need help following them. Show them on the page that "he" refers back to Dante, and that "the sight" substitutes for the whole underlined phrase before it. Do the same for inferences: when a text says the school bell rings at nine and Andy is pedaling as fast as he can, map where the knowledge that he is riding a bike to school actually came from, which is the reader's own head.
When students see these connections mapped concretely, their reading comprehension improves.Decodable texts can provide a supportive context for learning to decode and comprehend simultaneously. That was one of Dr. Cartwright's closing takeaways, and it is exactly why quality matters so much in a decodable.
Just Right Reader decodables are 90% decodable and feature real stories with a beginning, middle, and end, so students can practice identifying the main idea while practicing the phonics skill. Every book includes a QR code linking to a short video phonics lesson available in 14+ languages, and scripted lesson plans help teachers make that invisible thinking visible at school, home, and everywhere.
Frequently asked questions
What is a word caller?
A word caller is a student who reads words off a page accurately and fluently with little apparent understanding of what those words mean. Researchers describe this profile as reading comprehension difficulties, or RCD, because the difficulty is specific to comprehension while word recognition looks fine. These students often go unnoticed until end-of-grade comprehension testing.
How common is strong decoding with comprehension that lags behind?
About 20 to 30% of readers who need comprehension support fit this profile, according to research profiling students across multiple reading skills. That figure refers to 20 to 30% of the students who need comprehension support, not 20 to 30% of all readers. In a typical school, that is a meaningful group of students whose next step is something other than more phonics.
What are executive skills in reading?
Executive skills are the mental skills that let us manage thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to reach a goal. In reading, they include planning, organization, cognitive flexibility, inhibition, and working memory, and they allow a reader to coordinate decoding, vocabulary, syntax, and meaning at the same time. Research shows these skills are still developing in students with reading comprehension difficulties and in students with dyslexia.
Can executive skills actually be taught?
Yes. Each intervention Dr. Cartwright shared, from scrambled sentence work to sound and meaning card sorts to inference mapping, produced improvements in reading comprehension. The common ingredient is concrete scaffolding that makes invisible thinking processes visible and explicit. Some of the effects appear after as few as five focused lessons.
Does this mean phonics instruction isn't important?
No. If a child cannot decode, is not fluent, or lacks phonemic awareness and phonics knowledge, reading comprehension will break down, and explicit systematic phonics is exactly what that child needs. The point is that word reading is necessary but not sufficient. Students whose decoding is already strong need a different kind of support.
How do decodable books support comprehension, not just decoding?
High quality decodables ask students to coordinate sounds, letters, word parts, and meaning within a text they can actually read, which is the coordination these students find hardest. Books with genuine story structure, clear text features, and morphological word parts give students something to comprehend while they practice. That makes a decodable a practice ground for executive skills, not only for phonics.
Dr. Kelly Cartwright
Professor and Reading Researcher, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Dr. Cartwright studies how thinking and emotions shape the way we read and understand text, with a particular focus on what readers need in order to comprehend. She works with teachers across the country to translate that research into classroom reading instruction.
Watch the full webinar
Dr. Cartwright walks through the sample student data, the card sort, the story maps, and the inference mapping in full, with the teacher talk that goes with each one.
