Reading intervention is typically part of a school’s (federally mandated) RTI or Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS). It provides additional literacy instruction to students who are struggling.
Effective reading instruction includes five key aspects of literacy: phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary. In addition, writing compliments reading by reinforcing letter recognition, phonics skills, and vocabulary development.
Phonics
Phonics is the knowledge of letter-sound patterns that enables students to decode new words. Children who have good phonics skills can read more easily, quickly and independently.
Teaching phonics is one of the most important ways to help struggling readers learn to read. Research shows that if students receive explicit and systematic instruction in phonics, they can make substantial gains in reading.
Learning to segment and blend sounds is a crucial component of phonological awareness. It takes time to hone this skill and the distinction between short and long vowels can be particularly challenging for struggling learners.
This is an area where we need more research on phonics-based instruction for students with intellectual disability. However, we do have some evidence that phonics can be an effective way to teach decoding for students with ID. One study found that a phonics-based program had positive effects on decoding for students with moderate ID, even when taught by teachers in a small group format.
Fluency
Students need to read fluently to gain meaning from the words they are reading. Reading fluency also enables students to make grammatical inferences and understand figurative language.
Reading research supports the use of repeated reading as an effective fluency intervention for students with learning difficulties. Many studies have found that it is more effective than other interventions such as paired reading, passage previews and goal setting. In addition, it is also more effective when a teacher models and provides feedback to the students during the practice sessions.
To help students build fluency, we encourage you to incorporate the Pause, Prompt and Praise (PPP) strategy into your instruction. This involves encouraging students to stop and clarify a word they don’t know, rather than trying to guess it at the sentence or paragraph level. To support this, we also suggest you teach morphological awareness: breaking words into their base elements like prefixes and suffixes, as well as into their parts of speech such as subject, predicate and adverbial sections.
Comprehension
Comprehension is an active process that involves connecting what a student reads with his own knowledge and experiences. It requires that a reader understand the meanings of words and ideas and makes inferences to fill in gaps in information. It also requires understanding the relationships among different parts of a text, including the gist or main idea and supporting details.
To develop comprehension skills, teachers can use reading strategies that involve students in cooperative learning groups. For example, Reciprocal Teaching, a strategy developed by Palincsar and Brown, has each student take on the role of a summarizer, predictor, questioner or clarifier to reconstruct the meaning of a passage together. Other cooperative learning activities, such as class discussions, book clubs, grand conversations and paired reading, can support comprehension development as well.
When addressing comprehension, it is important to offer students texts at their grade level and to chunk informational text into manageable sections. This is a key strategy for developing reading fluency and will ultimately improve comprehension. However, studies show that this type of instruction alone does not lead to practical improvements on standardized reading comprehension tests.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary knowledge is one of the largest contributors to reading comprehension skills. Research has shown that students with low vocabulary scores have lower text comprehension, while students with satisfactory or high vocabulary scores have higher text comprehension (National Reading Panel 2000).
Educators can support the growth of vocabulary by providing students with exposure to varied texts and books, by teaching specific words with rich, robust instruction, and by teaching word-learning strategies that they can use independently. Additionally, educators can provide multisensory learning opportunities, which engage students’ visual and kinesthetic senses to help them remember new words, such as using flashcards with images or playing games that involve physical movement.
Another promising strategy for building vocabulary is book embedded vocabulary instruction, which involves explicit vocabulary instruction within a shared reading experience. For more information on this, see our blog post describing this approach.