Reading intervention is an effective way to promote literacy by delivering intensive targeted instruction to students who are reading below grade level. This approach is commonly implemented in the context of a Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) framework.
A typical student needs 1-4 exposures to a word before it becomes automatic. Teaching students to reread to build fluency is one example of a reading intervention strategy.
Phonemic Awareness
Explicit instruction in phonemic awareness is the foundation for reading and spelling success. Typically, students who have dyslexia or who struggle with speech or language disorders have a phonological deficit that can be addressed with explicit phonemic awareness instruction.
Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to notice, think about, and work with individual sounds in spoken language. This includes the ability to blend sounds into words, segment words into their sounds, and manipulate the syllables (sound groups) in a word. It also refers to understanding that all words can be broken down into a sequence of individual sounds.
Effective interventions include classroom and student practice activities to target the various levels of phonemic awareness. Students should be encouraged to use visual scaffolding like hands-on manipulatives, Elkonin boxes, and tokens to support the articulation and pronunciation of each sound. These activities will help them develop decoding skills and reduce the reliance on rote memorization when spelling.
Phonics
Phonics is the understanding that there is a predictable relationship between the sounds of spoken language (phonemes) and the letters that represent them in written language (graphemes). It is an important component for learning to read because it enables students to decode unfamiliar words.
Teaching phonics is an art, and a good program has a scope and sequence that teaches the new skills at a pace that struggling readers can keep up with. It also provides plenty of practice and lots of activities to help students master each skill.
Teachers were provided with a phonics-based reading intervention for their ID students and received two days of training on this program (12 h). They implemented the program in small groups, on average 2.8 lessons per week.
One of the most challenging aspects of phonics is separating the two components of a syllable—the onset and the rime. The onset is the initial consonant or consonant blend in a word, while the rime is the vowel sound and any consonants that follow it.
Comprehension
Many students with comprehension challenges may have sound early literacy skills, but still struggle to construct meaning from text. This could be due to a variety of factors, including foundational issues such as interpreting multisyllabic words, working memory and word recognition difficulties, or a lack of background knowledge and vocabulary proficiency.
To address these problems, teachers should provide students with explicit instruction, a variety of learning strategies and plenty of guided practice. Teachers should also use diagnostic assessments to understand each student’s needs and abilities, so that they can tailor their lessons accordingly.
Recent reading intervention research has been demonstrating a trend of diminishing effect sizes in the area of comprehension. However, this is likely due to increased study quality and the varying reading profiles of participating students. Longer duration interventions did not appear to moderate outcomes, while multicomponent interventions predicted small, positive effects. Interventions implemented in groups of fewer than 20 students also predicted smaller, positive effects.
Fluency
Reading fluency is the ability to read words at a rate that supports comprehension. Students who need fluency intervention typically have developed adequate word reading skills but read at a slow rate, read word-by-word, ignore punctuation, or look bored when reading. Students in need of fluency instruction can be identified by comparing their average words-correct-per-minute (wcpm) score on grade-level assessment passages to oral reading fluency norms.
Effective prosody is also essential for reading fluency. Teachers should model fluent reading and practice with students on snippets of text to develop their understanding of intonation, stress, and pacing.
Prompt, corrective feedback, repeated readings, and goal setting have been shown to be highly effective for increasing fluency. However, research on the specific aspects of a RR program that best facilitate generalized fluency gains across texts and students is limited. Research on matched-ability peer-modeling and proficient peer modeling is promising but needs to be replicated with larger groups of students to ensure validity and generalizability.