When a student has reading difficulties, educators use a multi-tiered system of support to address the problem. A key part of this model is effective reading intervention strategies that help students build phonics, decoding, fluency, and comprehension skills.
Explicit instruction is a teaching approach that provides clear, direct guidance to learners. It helps struggling readers understand their learning goals from the start and breaks down complex skills into small, manageable tasks.
Phonics
Students who struggle with reading are often missing the foundational skills of decoding and blending that are key to the success of their reading. Reading intervention can help these students close this gap by teaching them phonics, a system of teaching children to match the sounds they hear in words to the letters that stand for those sounds (graphemes).
There is no disagreement among researchers that explicit instruction in alphabetic principles helps children become proficient readers and writers. In fact, studies have found that phonics improves both the accuracy and speed of children’s word recognition.
The best phonics intervention programs are research-based and teach students to match a unit of sound (phoneme) with the letter or letters that represent it in written form. They also teach students how to blend these sounds together to read new words and phrases. These strategies are a great way to teach your struggling students how to read.
Comprehension
Reading comprehension is the ability to understand the meaning behind a text. It involves skills like predicting, clarifying, questioning, and summarizing. It also requires students to have background knowledge and vocabulary, parse syntax and text structure, and monitor their understanding as they read.
For example, a student with very weak decoding skills may still be able to understand the main ideas and message of a text because their language comprehension is strong. However, this student’s RC score would not improve much after an intervention aimed at improving his decoding skills because the problem was with comprehension, not his decoding.
This is why it’s so important to have an evidence-based curriculum that teaches all the components of literacy (including comprehension) through daily scripted lessons. Panorama’s Connect to Comprehension program teaches comprehension strategies alongside decodable texts and offers a comprehensive range of Tier 1 interventions for all elementary grades. Find out more here.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary is a body of words that readers need to understand in order to comprehend text. Research shows that the number and variety of words students know in their early years is a significant predictor of reading comprehension.
While some vocabulary learning occurs incidentally (as kids discuss unfamiliar words with peers or listen to adults read to them), explicit instruction in the meaning of new words is critical. Research also demonstrates that simply discussing unfamiliar words in context is often insufficient for learners to develop an understanding of the word.
Explicit vocabulary instruction includes teaching students about the structure of words (category, function/purpose/defining features, synonyms, antonyms) and helping them understand morphological elements (prefixes, suffixes, roots). Teachers also support student vocabulary development by connecting it to their curriculum. For example, introducing new words in science can help students understand concepts like chemical reactions and photosynthesis. Check out these 7 Effective Vocabulary Intervention Strategies to learn more.
Fluency
Students need to be able to read at a pace that allows them to comprehend the text they are reading. They need to be able to recognize sight words automatically and quickly, and read connected text accurately and with expression. They also need to be able to use their knowledge of how sentences are broken down (subject, predicate, and adverbial sections) and intonation and stress when reading aloud.
The literature has shown that fluency interventions are effective in improving oral reading rate and accuracy. Those that involve reading with teacher modeling have the best results, especially when combined with vocabulary instruction or matched-ability peer modeling. However, most of the RR research uses proximal measures and the evidence is mixed regarding the generalization of gains to unfamiliar texts. Further group design research is needed with adequate sample sizes and treatment durations to improve confidence in the findings, and to determine which aspects of RR lead to the most consistent and sustained improvement in fluency and comprehension.