Students in the upper elementary grades face new challenges as they read texts with longer words and more complex phonics patterns. For these students, building morphological awareness (prefixes, suffixes, and roots) can help them decode multi-syllabic words.
Reading intervention is intensive, targeted instruction aimed at bridging the gap between student performance and grade-level expectations. It’s usually part of a school’s RTI or MTSS framework.
Phonics
Phonics is a reading intervention that provides children with the necessary skills to decode words and to develop their vocabulary. It is especially effective with students who are below grade level in their literacy skill development.
When students can apply phonics strategies to read unfamiliar text, any book becomes accessible. This is because phonics helps them understand the structure of a word and its sounds, which then leads to comprehension.
During the Looking at Reading Interventions series, reading specialist Linda Farrell works with Calista on critical skills such as naming letters accurately, blending and manipulating sounds, connecting letter symbols to their sounds, and reading multisyllable words. As students move up the tiers of reading interventions, it is important to use data to determine their needs and provide them with instruction that will strengthen these skills. Typically, this will involve a strong focus on phonics. Several studies indicate that synthetic phonics approaches have higher impacts on decoding than analytic phonics approaches.
Vocabulary
In reading comprehension studies, vocabulary knowledge shows a strong relationship to understanding what is read. This is not surprising, since a lack of vocabulary knowledge is frequently associated with reading comprehension problems. In fact, regression analyses suggest that vocabulary accounts for a significant portion of variance in reading comprehension beyond the influences of decoding skills and nonverbal IQ.
Explicit instruction in vocabulary should focus on high utility words and academic language (i.e., the meanings of roots and combining forms, prefixes, and suffixes) using explicit instructional routines. It is important to help students relate new vocabulary to their experiences and prior knowledge, and to provide them with multiple opportunities to encounter and retain these words in context.
To support ESOL students in developing their vocabulary, it is helpful to point out the many cognates between English and their native languages (e.g., doctor/doctor, music/musica) and to encourage them to use context clues to infer word meanings. It is also critical to review and teach words that are necessary for content-specific text.
Comprehension
Comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading, and is a child’s ability to understand what they read. To comprehend, children must be able to visualize stories, anticipate what will happen next and make inferences based on the information they have read.
One way to improve comprehension is to build students’ vocabulary and language skills. Teachers can also use strategies such as predicting, questioning and clarifying to support students’ understanding.
Another way to improve comprehension is by teaching students to recognize the natural pauses between phrases in their reading. This can be done by using phrase-cued texts or through a strategy called “partner reading.”
More recently, researchers have focused on teaching students to synthesize information across larger text sections. They teach students to identify key words, through think alouds and guided practice, and to use these key words to create gist statements for each text section. This is a complex task, and requires a high degree of student responsibility. This type of intervention is often more effective when implemented in small groups or individualized instruction.
Reading Fluency
Reading fluency is the ability to read at an automatic rate, allowing readers to focus on comprehension. Research shows that fluent readers comprehend better than non-fluent readers.
To assess student reading fluency, administer a brief screening using an oral passage on grade-level text. Identify students who are below grade level in accuracy but on or above grade level in rate (as measured by the winter 2018 4th grade Hasbrouck and Tindal study of oral reading fluency ORF scores).
To develop reading fluency, have students practice repeatedly with a teacher, modeling good phrasing and expression as they read aloud. Teachers should also incorporate independent reading with guided, repeated and monitored practice. Research supports the effectiveness of these strategies for improving fluency, vocabulary and overall reading achievement.