Students with reading difficulties require specialized, targeted instruction. Many students who are a year or half-year behind grade level will need intensive intervention to prevent long-term reading difficulties.
Inquiry survey respondents reported that access to effective interventions is limited for students. Even for those with access, the programs are often not used in the earliest grades (Kindergarten to Grade 1 ideally and Grade 2 for some) or evidence-based.
Phonological Awareness
Developing children’s ability to hear and segment the individual sounds in spoken words sets the stage for decoding, blending, and word reading. Research shows that the vast majority of struggling readers have a core deficit in phonemic awareness.
Informal phonological awareness observation and assessment is the first step to identifying students needing intervention. This includes listening to kids as they talk, observing them during class activities, and taking anecdotal notes on their progress.
Typically, phonemic awareness instruction spans kindergarten through first grade and is done orally. It begins with simple tasks like rhyming and moves to more advanced skills such as blending sounds into words (e.g., ‘Blend these three sounds together: /m/, /a, n/’) and segmenting words into phonemes (e.g., ‘Say the first sound in salt: /s/, then the second: /t/, and then the third: /d/’). The National Reading Panel suggests that by kindergarten, students should be able to identify one-syllable words without a prompt, say single-syllable words independently, and clap or count the number of syllables in a word.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary is the “bank” of recognizable words to help us understand what we read. Without an extensive vocabulary, students will find it challenging to comprehend more complicated texts.
Research supports that explicit vocabulary instruction is essential to reading success. The National Reading Panel identified it as one of the “five pillars” of reading instruction.
Having strong academic vocabulary knowledge is vital to comprehension and educational assessment. Students need to be able to go beyond a dictionary definition of the word, such as knowing the prefixes and suffixes, to make connections with other words with similar meanings.
The best vocabulary strategies for students build context clues and are interactive and engaging. For example, giving students sticky notes and asking them to label vocabulary words can be fun and motivating. These strategies can also be easily adapted for families to practice at home. This helps close the gap for students with limited vocabulary. This is a key component of the Matthew Effect.
Comprehension
Many reading interventions use vocabulary development and instruction as an integral part of their program. These approaches help students build knowledge and vocabulary while also improving comprehension. Comprehension is complex cognitive process that involves integrating information from the text with students’ prior knowledge.
Several research studies have found that intervention programs lead to practical improvements on standardized tests such as the Woodcock Johnson III Oral Passage and Oral Comprehension subtests. However, the benefits of these programs are reduced if the student is still struggling with decoding skills.
In these board-developed intervention approaches, students who score low on a screener work with a teacher or speech-language pathologist in small groups for a defined period of time. However, these in-house interventions are seldom evaluated and do not address the full scope of word-reading skills needed to be effective readers. In addition, they are rarely implemented in a multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) framework.
Fluency
Students need to develop fluency to be able to transfer their attention from decoding to comprehending the meaning of text. Explicit fluency instruction should focus on addressing the underlying skills of decoding and automaticity as well as the more visible components of phrasing and expression.
Research on reading fluency interventions for struggling readers shows that a number of strategies are effective. These include student-adult reading (an adult models fluent reading of a passage and then the child reads it to him/her) paired with repeated readings, Reader’s Theatre, and a scaffolded corrective procedure on miscues.
To determine whether a student is in need of fluency intervention, compare his/her words-correct-per-minute score from two or three unpracticed readings of a grade-level assessment passage to oral reading fluency norms (e.g., Hasbrouck-Tindal). A student who scores ten or more words below the 50th percentile should receive fluency instruction. Students should practice reading texts that are reasonably easy for them, containing mostly words they know or can decode easily.