Reading intervention is noticing when a student struggles to read and then helping them on their own or in a small group. This involves looking at the main concepts that a pupil needs to grasp to be able to read well: phonemic awareness, phonics and comprehension.
Students with different patterns of reading difficulties display strengths that can be tapped into through intervention. These include a strong vocabulary, an interest in a topic and a good understanding of the story they’re reading.
Phonics
Phonics is the pathway to reading success, but can be a struggle for struggling readers. This is why it’s so important to provide students with the best decodable books and phonics intervention activities to help them master this critical reading skill.
Systematic phonics instruction (teaching the relationship between sounds and written spelling patterns, also known as graphemes) improves children’s ability to read new words by sounding them out and combining or ‘blending’ their phonemes into letters. This is the foundation for blending and segmenting multi-syllable words, which is the next step in reading.
To ensure that phonics intervention is effective, it must be systematic and explicitly taught. This involves a planned scope and sequence that builds from simple letter-sound correspondences to more complex patterns, as well as intentional review and practice of these skills. This enables students to quickly acquire and use these vital reading subskills, which will eventually lead to reading fluency and comprehension.
Fluency
Fluency refers to a reader’s ability to read words orally in a way that sounds natural. It also includes the ability to pause at appropriate times and to express meaning when reading.
In addition to phonics and vocabulary, fluency involves morphological awareness (the knowledge of prefixes, suffixes, and base words). These skills help readers decode irregular or new words, and make sense of what they read.
Recent synthesis studies have found that repeated reading interventions are effective for students with learning disabilities. However, results have been mixed with regard to secondary-grade students. This may be due to differences in background characteristics (e.g., age, comorbid diagnoses) and in the definition of “struggling reader,” which varied across studies. Moreover, some students’ needs vary with the reading level and text complexity. Therefore, interventions for struggling students in different grades need to be tailored differently. For example, it might be necessary to provide a different approach for upper-grade students with severe and persistent reading difficulties.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary relates to reading comprehension because it is necessary to have access to the meanings of words in order to read. Research has demonstrated high correlations between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. Moreover, it is known that children who have poor reading comprehension often have low-for-age vocabulary skills.
Vocabulary instruction is a critical component of effective reading interventions. However, research has shown that the average effect size of vocabulary instruction on standardized tests of vocabulary is modest. To increase the effect sizes, teachers should focus on activities that involve depth of processing, pairing contextual and definitional information, and providing multiple exposures of vocabulary items.
Children acquire a large proportion of their vocabulary incidentally, mainly through interactions with adults and peers in everyday situations and through the reading they do for fun. It is also important that they receive direct instruction in specific vocabulary items, so that the words become firmly placed in their long-term memory.
Comprehension
Comprehension is the ability to make meaning from text. It’s what allows children to visualize stories, anticipate what will happen next, and laugh at jokes. It’s also what makes reading enjoyable and helps kids become lifelong readers. Unfortunately, some struggling readers have trouble in different areas of comprehension. They might struggle with foundational decoding and fluency skills or they might have limited vocabulary knowledge or a poor understanding of text structure.
Fortunately, there are many ways to help students improve their comprehension. One approach is to teach students strategies to identify key words, formulate main ideas, and synthesize information across sections of text. Another way is to teach students how to use background knowledge to connect to the text. This can be done by asking open-ended questions and encouraging students to share their responses. Another way to improve comprehension is to teach students about the different structures of texts (e.g., narrative, expository). This can be done by using text analysis and providing students with targeted language processing activities that target specific types of texts.