Reading intervention offers specialized, targeted instruction to students who are struggling with reading. These strategies help students build essential components of reading, such as letter recognition, phonics, fluency, and vocabulary.
Practice pronunciation and reading aloud to improve their fluency. Play language games like charades, 20 questions, or word association to build morphological awareness (prefixes, suffixes and base words). Teach them the meaning of words they encounter so they can understand what they are reading.
Phonics
Phonics is a systematic approach to teaching reading. It involves breaking words down into their individual sounds and corresponding letter patterns (graphemes). It empowers children to decode unfamiliar text independently and accurately, opening up a world of possibilities.
Students who receive explicit phonics instruction make more progress on research-designed word and nonword reading tests than those who do not. The gains are even more substantial when the instruction is matched to the child’s level of skill.
Practice phonics with your students by using strategies such as the word slide or letter tiles. You can also use multi-sensory activities to support student engagement. For example, tracing the word on the table as students sound out the individual letters is technically multi-sensory because you are using more than one sense (see image below). You can find a list of programs with varying levels of evidence that meet ESSA requirements in the Best Evidence Encyclopedia. This resource is a great place to start when searching for evidence-based interventions for struggling readers.
Fluency
Reading fluency involves accurate reading of connected text at a conversational rate with appropriate prosody or expression. Research suggests that students who are fluent readers read better than non-fluent readers in any subject and that fluency is directly related to comprehension.
Fluency development requires regular practice, immersion, and engagement. It is important to provide a variety of texts and activities that encourage student reading. For example, incorporating activities that help build phonological awareness, decoding practice, spelling instruction, and vocabulary instruction can help improve fluency.
In addition, teaching morphological awareness (prefixes, suffixes, and bases) can help students pull apart words that don’t follow traditional patterns. This can help increase their reading speed.
Interventions that involve paired reading or repeated passages may be beneficial for improving fluency as well. However, students who can’t automatically decode words without a pause for each one they encounter may not benefit from these approaches alone. This is why it is important to incorporate phonological and vocabulary instruction with repeated reading.
Vocabulary
The more vocabulary a child knows, the more likely they are to comprehend what they read. Vocabulary is the set of words a person understands and uses in speaking, writing, and reading. It is the foundation of critical reading skills, including phonological awareness, phonics, and fluency.
Children learn vocabulary in two main ways: indirectly and directly. Indirectly, they encounter new words through being read to in classrooms, through conversations with adults, and through reading extensively on their own. Explicit vocabulary instruction, such as teaching specific words and teaching word-learning strategies, also aids comprehension.
The best way to support students’ learning of vocabulary is to teach it explicitly and in context. Use graphic organizers to help students think about new vocabulary and classify terms and concepts into meaningful categories, such as morphology bases (roots, prefixes, suffixes, tenses). Students can then build upon their newly learned vocabulary by providing sentences using the new words.
Comprehension
Students who are accurate and fluent readers may still struggle to understand the content of what they read. To improve comprehension, these students need explicit instruction in a variety of reading strategies and on the overall quality of the text they encounter.
Reading comprehension involves the orchestrated product of a range of linguistic and cognitive processes, including decoding, word identification, vocabulary, and reading strategies. These cognitive processes interact with a reader’s background knowledge, the features of the text, and the purpose and goals of the reading situation.
Teachers can teach children a variety of strategies that support their comprehension of texts, such as asking questions and discussing the reading. However, it is important to recognize that these strategies do not always work with all learners. The best way to increase the impact of these strategies is to ensure that the child’s weakness is addressed, ideally by teaching them the reading comprehension strategy that best meets their needs.