Reading intervention involves working with students who need extra support to improve their skills. These programs help students learn and practice decoding, fluency, comprehension and vocabulary.
Teachers use formative assessments and diagnostic assessments to monitor student progress. They start with a universal screener, then give additional assessments that focus on specific skills.
Phonics
Phonics is a direct, methodical way to teach decoding, which is the first step in reading and writing. It is also a helpful approach for teaching spelling patterns, like vowel sounds.
Research has shown that phonics instruction improves students’ reading skills, including decoding and comprehension. It is important for all children, especially struggling readers.
Teachers should use a variety of phonics intervention activities to meet the needs of each student, depending on their level of skill. These phonics intervention activities can include Picture Card Sort, Blending and Segmenting Sound and Vowels, CVC Poem Books and Digraph Reading Passages.
FastBridge offers a number of Tier 1 and Tier 2 phonemic awareness interventions that are aligned to our earlyReading assessment. Each intervention is designed to help students increase their accuracy and automaticity of individual sounds, blending and segmenting, and sound-letter correspondence. These phonics intervention activities can be used for both small groups and one to one support.
Comprehension
Reading comprehension is key to a student’s success in school. Students can have a number of different reading comprehension issues, such as difficulty decoding multisyllabic words, working memory challenges, or limited background knowledge.
Students who are struggling with reading comprehension often need to focus on strategies that help them connect what they read to their own experiences and knowledge. For example, students can be taught to use main idea and summarization instructions.
One of the best ways to help students gain a deeper understanding of text is through class discussion and read alouds. Students can also mark up texts with their thoughts and questions, as this allows them to interact with the text more.
Retell assessment is a popular method for assessing reading comprehension, but results vary depending on prompting conditions and the type of texts used (Reed & Petscher, 2012). Current recommendations are to scaffold these assessments by having students answer multiple-choice questions and inference questions over several readings.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary instruction is the teaching of individual words, and it can deepen students’ knowledge of word meanings and help them understand what they are reading. Specific word instruction can be used before, during, and after reading a text to help students learn new vocabulary words, comprehend the text, and use the newly learned vocabulary in their own writing and speech.
Students learn the majority of their vocabulary through incidental learning, including everyday experiences with oral and written language, listening to others read aloud, and reading extensively on their own. However, research indicates that direct vocabulary instruction can improve student comprehension and academic performance, especially for English learners.
Educators can help foster students’ passion for words and vocabulary by giving them multiple exposures to new words in context with kid-friendly definitions and by incorporating fun, interactive activities. Using these strategies, educators can cultivate lifelong readers and writers who embrace the challenge of new vocabulary and unfamiliar texts.
Fluency
Reading fluency involves reading at a rate that supports comprehension. Students who require explicit intervention in this area often have developed adequate word reading skills but read very slowly. They may struggle with phrasing and expression, read word-by-word, skip over punctuation or ignore it, or appear unmotivated.
To develop reading fluency, teachers need to model good fluent reading and provide practice opportunities with a variety of texts. They should also time students as they read and provide feedback. Many students respond to this type of feedback, especially when they can see that they are improving their fluency.
Studies examining reading fluency interventions have found Repeated Reading (RR) to be highly effective for students with learning difficulties, particularly those in grades K-5. RR focuses on increasing words read correctly per minute with the help of teacher modeling and performance feedback. In addition, some studies have shown that combining RR with passage previews and goal setting is more effective than RR alone.