Reading intervention is a core component of the federally mandated Response to Intervention or Multi-Tiered System of Support. Students struggling with reading need to make accelerated progress in order to become proficient readers.
Effective reading instruction includes explicit and systematic phonological awareness, decoding, vocabulary, and comprehension strategies. Research has examined different ways to increase intensity of interventions, including instructional grouping, length of time in the intervention, and treatment modalities.
Phonics
Phonics is reading instruction that helps students understand how letters and groups of letters link to sounds, forming letter-sound relationships (decoding). Systematic phonics is an effective reading intervention strategy.
When children understand the connection between sounds and letters, they can decode new words on their own. This can help them read faster and more accurately.
Research has found that systematic synthetic phonics instruction has positive effects on reading skills for both disabled and low-achieving children of all socioeconomic backgrounds. These gains are greater than those seen with whole class or whole school approaches that do not include tutoring.
To ensure success, phonics instruction must be explicit and systematic. Teachers should begin with high-utility letters like m, a, and s, teaching the letter names while explicitly saying the sounds they represent. They should also provide plenty of time and repetition to practice these lessons to automaticity. Additionally, it’s important to teach vowel sounds first, as they can be more difficult for students to distinguish than consonant sounds.
Fluency
Fluency makes reading—and learning—easier. Students who are fluent readers gain confidence in their abilities, which fuels interest and motivation to read more. They also encounter a greater variety of words in context, which enhances their vocabulary and language development.
To build fluency, children should practice naming letters and sounds, then move to word reading and eventually sentence and passage reading. They should be taught how to pronounce words correctly and the importance of prosody, including intonation, volume, smoothness, phrasing, and expression.
Reading intervention studies have shown large pre-post test gains for phonological awareness, decoding skill, and comprehension. However, the majority of RTI schools provide less than 30 minutes of daily fluency instruction, which is insufficient to meet national standards and student outcomes. Students in these low-intensity programs often miss the goal of becoming proficient by the end of kindergarten.
Comprehension
Children who comprehend what they read can visualize a story, answer questions about the plot, anticipate what will happen next, laugh at jokes and make inferences. Comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading. It requires that students be able to decode the symbols that represent words (reading based on letter sounds) and then attach meaning to those words so they can understand what they have read.
Several variables affect comprehension, including background knowledge, vocabulary, cognitive abilities and motivation. Educators can help students develop these skills by providing explicit instruction and fostering a positive learning environment. In addition to incorporating strategies such as visualizing, asking questions and summarizing, teachers can facilitate social contexts that foster the use of comprehension strategies by encouraging students to talk with their peers, act out scenes from stories, or write new endings for stories. This can be done during whole group shared and guided reading, book clubs or discussion groups. It can also be done in paired reading activities where students are supported by the teacher in their decoding, fluency and comprehension practices.
Vocabulary
Learning vocabulary is a necessary component of reading comprehension. According to the Science of Reading, acquiring new words and their meanings helps readers understand academic language in disciplines like math, science, history, and social studies, as well as on standardized tests and educational assessments.
Vocabulary proficiency and reading comprehension are directly related. However, focusing solely on vocabulary instruction without considering the context in which students encounter vocabulary is not enough to support comprehension.
Using words in sentences and encouraging students to use them in conversation will help learners gain a deeper understanding of the words and their meanings. Also, teaching students to infer word meanings will enable them to make educated guesses about unfamiliar words while reading. In addition, teaching students to create semantic maps will give them opportunities to reinforce the connections between words.