Reading intervention is when teachers provide extra instruction for students who are struggling with reading. This can take place during their core reading instruction or outside of class.
Reading interventions help students build essential components of reading, such as phonological awareness, phonics, comprehension and vocabulary. These strategies are often broken down into tiers and used in conjunction with reading assessments and progress monitoring.
Phonological Awareness
Children’s phonological awareness is one of the most important pre-reading skills. Research shows that a child’s ability to recognise individual sounds in words and map them to letters is highly predictive of reading success.
Developing a strong foundation in phonological awareness can help students to develop other literacy skills such as word recognition, decoding, spelling and grammar. These literacy skills are not learned independently and must be taught in conjunction with phonological awareness.
Practice separating words into their individual sounds, clapping out syllables, listening to stories and singing songs with your students as a fun way to improve phonemic awareness.
Use progress monitoring to track the growth of your student’s phonological awareness. This process will enable you to differentiate your instruction and provide students with targeted practice, personalised feedback and explicit guidance too.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary is a crucial reading intervention skill that helps students understand the meaning of words they read. In fact, research has shown that students with a high vocabulary score are more likely to have an excellent comprehension skills score than those with a low vocabulary score (National Reading Panel, 2000).
Vocabulary development is especially important for English-language learners. Often times, they struggle with reading because of a lack of academic language or high-utility words in their vocabulary (Calderon et al, 2005).
One way to build vocabulary is through incidental learning, like hearing words spoken in the classroom or at home, listening to books read aloud, and interacting with academic language and content. Another great strategy is teaching students the morphological features of words, so they can unlock the meaning of new words by looking for affixes, prefixes, and suffixes. Another fun and engaging strategy is to give students sticky notes and have them label words that apply to the items around them.
Comprehension
Reading comprehension is a child’s ability to understand what they have read. This is a critical skill that allows children to visualize a story, anticipate what will happen next, and make inferences about the text or story.
Poor readers often lack sufficient background knowledge to interpret the meaning of new words they encounter. They also have trouble understanding the organizational structure of different genres of texts. And, even when they have access to relevant background knowledge, they may not be able to activate it in order to understand what they read.
Research shows that teaching comprehension strategies to students who struggle with reading is effective. For example, instruction that focuses on main idea and summarization strategies improves students’ performance on both proximal and standardized measures (Scammacca et al., 2015). Similarly, instruction that breaks large pieces of informational text into manageable sections improves students’ performance on both proximal measures and standardized tests (Nippold, 2014). These strategies help lighten the mental load for struggling readers as they work to comprehend complex reading material.
Fluency
Students who read in a fluent manner are able to focus more of their energy on comprehending the meaning of the text rather than decoding individual words and stringing them together. This is especially important in longer passages where children might otherwise spend more time thinking about how to pronounce and spell words than they do about understanding the subject matter.
To improve reading fluency, educators should provide children with opportunities to hear a range of stories and informational texts being read aloud in a variety of ways (e.g., child/adult reading, choral reading, Reader’s Theatre). Children should be given opportunities to practice a range of skills such as pause for punctuation, use voice pitch and intensity to express emotion, and use a wide vocabulary.
Some educators may be reluctant to allow children to reread passages out loud because they are afraid that the students might memorize them, but research shows that repeated oral reading can significantly improve reading fluency. Some evidence-based interventions to improve fluency include choral reading, tutor/student paired reading, and the use of high-interest books such as rhymes or rhythmic text.