Reading intervention is often a part of a school’s Response to Intervention (RTI) or Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS). The goal of reading intervention is to improve students’ reading skills, especially for those who are struggling.
Research shows that individualized reading interventions can help students achieve more than non-individualized instruction. They can include instruction in foundational skills (phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency), comprehension, or both.
Comprehension
Comprehension is essential if reading is to have a purpose and if readers are to learn from text. Readers bring a wide range of cognitive abilities, language knowledge and skills, motivations, and background knowledge to reading, all of which impact comprehension.
While research on foundational and phonological skills has focused primarily on how to teach those skills, little attention has been given to teaching comprehension strategies. This is partly because comprehension has been described as a higher-level thinking skill that is not necessarily based on decoding or fluency skills.
Interventions that are individualized for comprehension have been shown to improve comprehension outcomes. However, the moderator effects for individualized interventions vary across studies in terms of how much of the instruction is individualized and what aspects of instruction are individualized. Interventions that are multicomponent have also been shown to improve comprehension outcomes, although their effect sizes are not as consistent as those from individualized interventions. Group size was a significant moderator of comprehension outcomes, with smaller groups showing larger effect sizes.
Fluency
Fluency is the ability to read at a speed that allows children to allocate their mental resources to understanding the meaning of text. Children who are fluent readers can visualize a story, anticipate what will happen next, laugh at jokes, and make inferences. They can also make connections between ideas and identify themes.
Several studies have investigated the effects of various instructional routines on reading fluency, including teacher modeling and peer-mediated repeated reading in matched-reading-ability pairs. However, two fundamental questions remain: 1) the dimensionality of text reading fluency including text reading efficiency (accuracy and speed) and reading prosody, and 2) the directionality of the relation between text reading fluency and reading comprehension.
Explicit instruction should target all components of fluency, such as articulation, phonological awareness, decoding, spelling, and vocabulary. It should also build morphological awareness through the teaching of prefixes, suffixes, and base words, helping students pull apart and define words that do not follow traditional patterns.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary is one of the most critical components of reading. When a reader encounters a new word in a text, they must know what the word means in order to read it and understand its meaning. This requires a large vocabulary that can quickly infer the meaning of unfamiliar words based on their context and existing knowledge. Vocabulary weaknesses contribute significantly to reading difficulties and can exacerbate existing differences between students.
As a speech language pathologist, you can help children with vocabulary difficulties by providing specific vocabulary instruction and ensuring that your students receive explicit, systematic, cumulative, diagnostic and responsive instruction. You can also use vocabulary-building activities that are appropriate to the students’ age and abilities.
Explicit vocabulary instruction should be embedded within curriculum-based activities and should focus on high-frequency words, domain-specific words and key words in the content area. You should also provide explicit instruction on the words with multiple meanings to ensure that students are able to differentiate between them.
Spelling
While the National Reading Panel omitted spelling from its list of essential components of literacy instruction (phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension), research has shown that both spelling and reading rely on the same core knowledge — that the letters represent speech sounds.
For this reason, many of the same strategies that improve phonological awareness and phonics also improve spelling and reading. These include teaching students the phonograms and graphemes of high-frequency words, focusing on syllabication, encouraging students to practice breaking longer words into syllables both verbally and in writing, and offering explicit, systematic spelling instruction that incorporates both vocabulary and grammar.
Several studies have found that spelling intervention programs with intensive instruction and regular practice result in improved spelling outcomes for children with learning disabilities. (Berninger et al, 2002; Graham, 2000). See our list of evidence-based spelling interventions for more information.