Reading intervention is an essential part of a child’s literacy development. It addresses students with reading difficulties and helps them regain missed skills.
Using a universal screener and diagnostic assessment, teachers determine where students are struggling with their reading. Then they give them targeted instruction and formative assessments. This includes phonological awareness, phonics, and comprehension.
Phonics
Whether in the classroom or one-on-one, explicit instruction in phonics helps struggling readers decode words and build their knowledge of letter-sound correspondences. Research confirms that students need strong phonics skills to read fluently and comprehend text.
To determine your students’ phonics needs, look at your Tier 1 universal literacy screening assessments (FAST Bridge, DIBELS, or Acadience Learning). Look for the first skill that they did not pass – this will be their area of need. Then sort through the assessments and keep notes of students who have similar deficits – these are your potential phonics intervention groups.
There are a few good phonics intervention programs on the market – look for one that is aligned to your state standards. There is also a lot of research on the effectiveness of these phonics programs. Generally, whole-class and school-wide approaches with tutoring have the largest impact on students. These programs have shown to improve students’ word and non-word reading on researcher-designed tests, with medium effect sizes.
Comprehension
Comprehension is a necessary counterpart to reading skills as it allows children to engage with stories and information. Students who comprehend can visualize, make predictions, connect new knowledge to existing information and understand the meaning behind words and sentences.
A student’s comprehension skills are influenced by their cognitive abilities (attention, memory and reasoning), language knowledge and skills, and their background knowledge and motivations. There is a lot of variability among students. Therefore, it is important to identify the specific areas of difficulty along Scarborough’s Rope, including foundational issues such as phonics and decoding multisyllabic words, and higher-level skills like morphological awareness, vocabulary instruction, and text structure.
Teachers can provide effective comprehension interventions by activating students’ background knowledge using prereading discussions, concept maps and anticipation guides, and through class discussion of texts. They can also support students in constructing their own mental representations of the text by asking them to make predictions, answer questions and create visual images.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary is the toolbox that helps children unlock the meaning of what they read. Without it, reading is like trying to solve a puzzle with some pieces missing.
Vocabulary development is especially important for English-language learners. Research shows that their poor vocabulary is a significant barrier to reading at grade level (Calderon et al, 2005).
To address this challenge, educators should use strategies that promote explicit instruction in word meanings and spellings. These include the “Essential Word Routine,” a quick, effective way to preteach new words that will support comprehension (such as synonym, antonym, and meaning-from-context questions). Teachers and clinicians should also prompt students to notice and revel in words they encounter in their daily lives, such as by posting target words on a bulletin board or privately encouraging family members and other school professionals to use them with students. In this way, they can help children develop an active, lifelong love of language. This can have a powerful, positive impact on their reading skills.
Fluency
Increasing fluency allows children to read words automatically, which frees up cognitive energy so that they can focus on understanding what they read. Fluency instruction also involves teaching expression and phrasing, which is called prosody.
A number of studies have found that Repeated Reading (RR) is a powerful reading intervention for students with low fluency. RR is especially effective when it includes passage previews and goal setting and when it is combined with vocabulary instruction.
In a typical lesson, the student practices reading the same passage multiple times and is graded on the number of words they correctly read per minute (WCPM). This is a measure of their reading rate, but also includes errors that may be made while reading. Often, the teacher will tally and subtract miscues such as missed, added, or pronounced words. Lessons last about 30 minutes. Several experimental conditions have been tested, including: