Author: Melanie Bennet
When a child gets stuck on a word, some teachers ask them to look at the picture for clues or think about what would make sense in the sentence instead of taking a conventional approach. In other words, they’re being taught to guess how to read.
A new report from the Aristotle Foundation argues the practice is leaving kids without the reading skills they need. Depending on the province, the report says, between 20 and 56 per cent of students cannot read by Grade 4.
The authors estimate that today’s Grade 10 students are two to three years behind in reading compared with students in the same grade 25 years ago.
They say the decline began well before the pandemic.
The method is called cueing and is part of an approach known as balanced literacy. The authors say guessing from context can be especially hard for children learning English.
They recommend structured literacy, which teaches children how letters represent sounds and how to break unfamiliar words into parts they recognize.
If that sounds familiar, it’s probably because that’s how most of us learned to read in school.
Sounding out the words only gets you so far. In one study cited in the report, students read a passage about a baseball game. Weaker readers who knew baseball did better on the task than stronger readers who knew little about the sport.
Early intervention can make a big difference. In a program involving about 1,000 struggling readers across five provinces, students practiced in small groups for half an hour four times a week. The report says 80 per cent made the equivalent of a year and a half of reading progress in five months, while half needed no further intervention.
The authors say the current standard in teacher training is one of the reasons reforms have been slow. Ontario’s 2022 Right to Read inquiry report found that, with few exceptions, the province’s English-language public faculties of education had failed to teach future teachers evidence-based methods for early reading.
When Ontario moved to require early reading screening, two teachers’ unions challenged the mandate, arguing that it undermined teachers’ professional judgment.
Dyslexia Canada’s August 2025 snapshot listed Alberta and New Brunswick, along with Nova Scotia and Ontario, as having removed cueing from their curriculum and instructional guidance. According to the report, none of the four required new teachers to show they could teach structured literacy to get a license.
Ontario’s human rights commission made 157 recommendations in its Right to Read inquiry. Two years later, most still hadn’t been fully implemented.
The Aristotle Foundation says that provinces should train teachers in systematic reading instruction and have them check students’ progress regularly. When a child is struggling, the authors say schools should give them help with the specific skills they’re missing as soon as the problem is identified.