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Katrina Sutton, Katrina Sutton Education, AustraliaAbstract
Adolescent literacy presents a significant educational challenge, with many students entering secondary schooling with persistent reading difficulties and low academic self-efficacy. This paper presents the experience and findings of a literacy intervention specialist who developed a structured literacy intervention designed to address both skill acquisition and learner engagement. The program is informed by the Science of Reading (Castles et al., 2018), multisensory structured language instruction (Birsh, 2018), and research on explicit instruction, feedback, and engagement (Hattie, 2023). A key pedagogical feature is the deliberate emphasis on what is described within the program as an “identity of success,” whereby instruction is structured to ensure students experience frequent, visible success and errors are reframed as part of learning. This relational teaching approach is intended to reduce anxiety and support engagement. This paper reports practitioner-collected data from 101 students over a ten-year period. Of these, 91.5% achieved reading mastery and 84% achieved combined reading and spelling mastery, with most requiring approximately 40 or more hours of instruction. The cohort included a high proportion of students with diagnosed learning differences, including Specific Learning Disorder (SLD), Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Ongoing longitudinal follow-up confirms students have achieved success in a range of post-school pathways including tertiary study, vocational training, and employment. The paper argues that structured literacy approaches, when combined with relational pedagogy and repeated experiences of success, can improve engagement and literacy outcomes for adolescent learners. For students who have internalised an identity of academic failure, these changes represent a substantial shift in confidence, agency, and educational participation. Ultimately, teaching is not only about what is taught, but how learning is experienced and who the learner becomes as a result.
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Conference: PCE2026Stream: Education
This paper is part of the PCE2026 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Sutton K. (2026) The Lost Children: Re-engaging Adolescent Literacy Through Structured Intervention, Relational Pedagogy, and the Identity of Success ISSN: 2758-0962 The Paris Conference on Education 2026: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 656-666) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2758-0962.2026.50
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2758-0962.2026.50
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