Reading intervention is a component of a school’s Response to Intervention (RTI) or Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS). Schools will typically provide reading interventions for students who have been deemed struggling readers.
The program teaches students foundational skills like rhyming, identifying individual sounds in words and understanding syllables. It also introduces the alphabetic principle or phonics and builds fluency through repeated reading of books that promote comprehension.
Phonics
Phonics involves learning the relationship between letters, sounds, and words. This is the most foundational component of reading and is key to developing decoding skills. This video series shows teachers how to build on children’s foundational skills in a fun and engaging way. Each episode includes detailed Viewer’s Guides and Facilitator’s Guides to support professional development at your school or district.
When teaching phonics, it is important to follow the research and teach systematically and explicitly. The evidence suggests that teaching a small group of students in the classroom by a trained teacher is most effective. This provides individual attention and allows the teacher to monitor progress and intervene when necessary.
To determine what skills to target, teachers can begin by using a universal screener, such as a DIBELS or Fast Bridge assessment, to identify students who are struggling. Then they can use diagnostic assessments and formative assessments to see where a student is lacking skills.
Fluency
In the early reading stage, decoding enables children to learn letters and their sounds. When they have mastered decoding, children begin to progress through the next stage of reading development — comprehension. Comprehension is the ability to think about stories, anticipate what’s going to happen next, and make inferences. It’s the ultimate goal of reading.
While fluency and comprehension may seem like different types of language skills, they’re actually closely linked. Research has shown that reading fluently frees cognitive energy so students can focus on meaning.
To build fluency, teachers need to emphasize speed, accuracy, and expression. They should also focus on teaching prosody, which includes intonation, volume, stress, and rhythm. Additionally, teachers should provide students with opportunities to practice their fluency and encourage them to choose reading materials that are at or above their instructional level.
Comprehension
While phonics and fluency are foundational to comprehension, students must be able to think about what they read and make inferences to understand it. They also need to be able to recognize words that follow a pattern (morphological awareness).
Teaching students strategies for monitoring their own understanding is called metacognition. This includes strategies for activating background knowledge, clarifying the purpose of reading a text, and making predictions. It also involves evaluating whether a student has understood the text they just read and taking action accordingly.
Comprehension instruction often takes place in a social context, and teachers can capitalize on this by using cooperative learning structures such as group discussion and book clubs. They can also use paired reading and large-group activities such as choral reading to emphasize strategy use in a social environment. Another effective strategy is to use phrase-cued texts to train students to recognize natural pauses in their reading and reread for understanding.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary is the collection of words that a student knows in a given language. Students need to understand the meanings of these words in order to understand the text they are reading.
Clinicians can help students develop their vocabulary by deliberately using sophisticated words in their interactions with students, encouraging them to “catch” the clinician using these words, and rewarding students when they do so. These activities keep attention focused on the complexities of language and build enjoyment with it.
It is important for struggling readers to have high quality vocabulary knowledge in order to comprehend what they are reading. Students may accumulate this knowledge on their own through extensive reading and rich language environments, but it can be a slow process. Teaching vocabulary explicitly can accelerate the process. Our 5CCL Activity Library contains dozens of science of reading-aligned activities to help students grow their vocabulary. Robust instruction in word meanings, morphology and spelling is supported by current research (McKeown, Crosson, Beck, & Sandora, 2012; McKeown, M.G., & Beck, I.L. Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, Award R305A100440).