Students who struggle with reading can have a hard time keeping up academically and socially. They may fall behind in their grades, live below the poverty line, and end up in prison.
Research shows that a reading intervention can help these students. The most effective programs use explicit instruction, modeling, guided practice with corrective feedback, and student independent practice using aligned student materials.
Phonics
Phonics is the pathway to literacy – but it can also be a big hurdle for struggling readers. A comprehensive phonics assessment can identify the gaps in students’ foundational skills and direct them to the appropriate reading intervention activities.
When students can apply phonics strategies to decode unfamiliar text, any text becomes accessible. This allows them to build fluency and comprehension skills.
When students are first learning to decode, it’s important for them to focus on short and long vowel sounds – since every single syllable in a word requires a vowel sound. Students should also spend time working on blending the individual vowel sounds together. This can be done with word slides – where the student slides their hand up and down while segmenting and then blending the sounds. It’s critical for students to practice each phonics skill until it’s automatic. Research shows that phonics interventions have positive impacts on word and non-word reading for students with ID.
Fluency
Students who have fluency problems often read at a slow rate. They may read word by word, skip over punctuation or lack expression when reading aloud. They may also have trouble with making their reading sound like language (inflection, voice, volume, smoothness, and phrasing).
To build fluency, students should practice decoding words as well as sight words. They should also read and recite poems that have rhythm, rhyme schemes and repetitive patterns to improve sight word recognition.
Students can also work on fluency by practicing with a partner, reading to the teacher or using a stopwatch and recording their oral reading speed. They can then see their progress and become motivated to continue improving.
Comprehension
Comprehension is the ability to make sense of a text. It is a complex process that includes a series of cognitive and language skills including attention, encoding, integration and memory. This outcome is a critical one for students who struggle with reading, as it allows them to gain meaning from the content that they read and connect it to their own experiences.
Teaching comprehension strategies, such as questioning, visualizing, monitoring/clarifying and inferring, is an important part of reading intervention. It is also crucial to teach students to understand the structure of a narrative or expository text (e.g., identifying main idea statements, finding supporting details and synthesizing information across sections of text).
Previous research has found that changing comprehension is challenging to achieve in a short period of time. To achieve these changes, it is important to focus on teaching and practicing foundational component skills such as decoding, fluency, vocabulary, morphological awareness, and reading strategies in small groups or through individualized instruction.
Reading Strategies
Reading strategies are techniques students use to help them construct meaning from a text. These vary depending on the genre or text type, and teachers should be sure to provide students with a variety of strategies so that they can call on what works best for them. One of the most important reading strategies is activating prior knowledge, which involves making connections between a new text and something that already exists in the reader’s knowledge base. Another reading strategy is visualizing, which is done while reading and encourages the student to imagine what the writer is describing. Finally, inferring is an active reading strategy that involves asking questions about the text to find clues that can be used to determine meaning.
Many states’ reading laws require that teachers only use research-based methods, which are strategies that have been proven to work. These include reading strategies like repeated reading, which involves selecting short passages and having the student read them multiple times to improve fluency. Other common reading intervention strategies include vocabulary lessons, morphological awareness (like teaching prefixes and suffixes), and relating to self, which is when the reader uses their own experiences with the text to connect it to them.