Reading intervention is intensive, targeted instruction designed to accelerate the reading skills of students who read below grade level. This can occur inside or outside of the classroom.
Explicit instruction is teacher-led, clear and direct. It involves identifying student needs, providing explicit learning of new reading skills and strategies and offering ongoing opportunities for practice.
Phonics
The teaching of phonics is an important part of Reading intervention. It helps struggling readers learn to decode words by blending and segmenting sound-spelling patterns.
Phonics instruction focuses on the smallest units of sound in spoken language, known as phonemes. It also involves teaching letter-sound relationships and how these relate to the written representations of those sounds (graphemes).
Students who receive phonics intervention may have gaps in their skills ranging from the onset to the rime of a syllable or the blending and segmenting of phonics patterns such as vowels with consonants. Regardless of the specifics, phonics interventions focus on strengthening these gaps through explicit and systematic instruction.
To provide a solid foundation, phonics intervention programs typically start with teaching CVC words, which begin with a consonant and end in a vowel. This gives students the building blocks they need to move on to more complex phonics patterns and rules. Let’s Go Learn has many resources and tools to help teachers find the right phonics instruction for each student.
Vocabulary
Students must know the meanings of words in order to make sense of what they read. However, many children experience underlying weaknesses in their vocabulary knowledge that prevent them from reading grade-level text. Explicit intervention for vocabulary builds students’ word knowledge so they can comprehend written material.
Research shows that teaching vocabulary directly improves comprehension for both native English speakers and non-native English speakers. Vocabulary instruction should be explicit, with easy-to-understand definitions presented in context, and multiple opportunities to process the meaning of new words through discussion, writing, games, and hands-on experiences.
Exposing students to new words frequently through classroom read-alouds and discussions, incorporating them into subject-specific lessons and activities, and extending their independent reading time outside of school can all support their vocabulary development. This is especially important because students need repeated exposure to words in rich contexts to understand their meaning and application. Returning to the story or topic context where students met a new vocabulary word is also helpful.
Fluency
Reading fluently and with expression allows students to free up cognitive energy so they can focus on decoding words and attaching meaning to them. It also improves comprehension, which is the ultimate goal of Reading intervention.
To teach students to read fluently, teachers should use choral reading and partner reading strategies. They should also teach students sight word recognition and increase the automaticity of these sight words, first in isolation and then with connected text passages. FastBridge offers four fluency interventions that can help teachers build both word-level and paragraph-level fluency.
The Lexia Core5 program teaches reading fluency through warm-up activities and review units that increase processing speed. It includes activities that address the subskills of automatic word recognition, automatic phrasing, and prosody. Moreover, the program provides all students—including Emerging Bilinguals and students with dyslexia—with a systematic, structured approach to building reading skills from phonological awareness through phonics, fluency, and comprehension.
Comprehension
Comprehension skills are the linchpin of learning, enabling students to access and analyze information, think critically, solve problems, and communicate effectively. Educators play a critical role in fostering comprehension development through explicit instruction, scaffolding, and opportunities for practice and reflection. Voyager Sopris Learning’s reading intervention programs, LANGUAGE! Live and REWARDS, offer a range of strategies to help students develop strong comprehension skills.
The cognitive process of comprehension includes attention, encoding (converting sensory input into a format that the brain can manipulate), and integration (connecting new information with existing knowledge frameworks stored in memory). Evidence supports instructional approaches that target comprehension monitoring, identification of main ideas, and summarization as ways to improve reading comprehension. These techniques are used in conjunction with phonics and other foundational skills instruction.