Most school boards use unreliable or invalid assessments to determine who receives reading intervention. These assessments look at students’ book-reading levels at specific points in the year.
The Ministry and school boards should use standardized measures to judge the effectiveness of all interventions and prevent inappropriate exclusions from accessing them.
Phonics
Phonics is a reading intervention approach that focuses on teaching pupils to systematically link sounds they hear in words with the written spelling patterns (graphemes) that represent them. This is the foundation of decoding new words when reading.
Studies have shown that systematic synthetic phonics instruction has higher impact on students with learning disabilities than instructional approaches that are less explicit. However, it also improves the reading skills of low socioeconomic status pupils who are not disabled.
Vowels are trickier for beginning readers to hone in on because they sound quite similar to each other. Practicing long and short vowel sounds before moving on to more complex phonics patterns can make all the difference in building students’ fluency and understanding the importance of sounding out each letter to determine its onset and rime.
Using multi-sensory learning methods is another great way to teach phonics to your struggling learners. Tracing a word on the table while saying each sound and sounding it out can be considered multi-sensory, for example.
Fluency
Fluency – the ability to read quickly and accurately – is an important component of reading comprehension. It allows readers to shift their attention from recognizing individual words to understanding what the text is saying.
Research has shown that children who are fluent readers comprehend better and are more likely to enjoy reading. Fluency is an essential skill that can be taught and learned through a variety of ways. Providing opportunities to hear adults reading aloud, having students read to each other, practicing with a model, and using Reader’s Theatre are all effective methods for building fluency.
However, the directionality of the relationship between text reading fluency and comprehension remains unclear. Further research is needed to determine whether fluency interventions impact comprehension or merely serve as a byproduct of increased word reading efficiency and post-lexical comprehension processes.
Comprehension
Comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading — children should be able to visualize stories, anticipate what happens next, and laugh at jokes. But comprehension is much more than the ability to read the words on a page — it also involves understanding what those words mean and how they fit together.
Research demonstrates that students with foundational word-reading and bridging skills who struggle to comprehend grade-level texts require explicit instruction in reading comprehension strategies. These strategies help them build a conceptual framework that unpacks the meaning of text.
Educators also can support comprehension by building students’ awareness of the structure of different genres of text, including how narrative text (stories) and expository text are organized. They can build morphological awareness by teaching students prefixes, suffixes, and bases so they understand how words work together.
Lastly, educators can support comprehension by selecting grade-level, rigorous texts aligned to Tier 1 instruction in topic or theme and by planning before-, during-, and after-reading activities, including text-dependent questions.
Reading Strategies
Reading is a complex activity that requires the use of many different strategies. Each strategy serves a purpose and kids need to have a toolbox of methods they can pull out when needed.
For example, if your child is struggling to decode a word, they should use all the decoding strategies they have learned. This will help them get through the difficult word and continue to develop their reading skills.
Other strategies include partnering with another student or adult and taking turns reading sections of the text. This helps build fluency and understanding of the text while encouraging students to talk about what they’re reading. Pronunciation is also important for students, especially when learning new words. Teach your child to pronounce each sound in a word as well as the overall meaning of the word. Develop morphological awareness by teaching your child prefixes, suffixes and base words to help them recognize words that follow traditional patterns.