Students who score low on a reading screener are eligible for intervention programs. These in-house approaches often require a speech-language pathologist or educator to work with students for a specified amount of time.
Children with MRD, like Ben, need phonics interventions that are systematic and explicit, as well as opportunities to apply decoding skills to reading text. They also need vocabulary instruction that targets their comprehension weaknesses.
Read Aloud
Reading aloud to children is an essential element of early literacy instruction. It teaches children that books are worth listening to; it expands students’ background knowledge; and it demonstrates how to read aloud with expression, pacing, volume, pauses, and eye contact.
It also provides models of fluent reading and builds vocabulary. In addition, when teachers are interactively engaging with children while reading, they model how to make meaning from a book through the use of discussion prompts and reader responses.
For infants and toddlers, simple open-ended questions like “Where is Mama Llama going?” help them engage with the story by describing pictures or making predictions. As children develop, you can increase the complexity of the questions as well as the amount of time spent on reading and discussions to meet individual student needs. Ideally, the entire class is involved in discussing a text to build community and support comprehension. However, this is not always possible given young children’s limited attention spans.
Guided Oral Reading
Informed by Vygotsky’s notion of the Zone of Proximal Development, guided reading is a specific instructional approach that involves teachers supporting small groups of students to read for meaning. Teachers select texts that match the group’s learning focus identified through observation of student reading, individual conference notes and anecdotal records.
The teacher provides correction, feedback and instruction on specific skill development. This is NOT the same as various independent reading programs that are incorrectly labeled ‘guided reading’ and which do not have the same evidence base.
While the student is reading out loud, the teacher or other proficient reader must be looking at the printed text to provide immediate feedback and support for the student’s decoding skills. This is critical until the student reaches the point where they are reading accurately with few errors per page and the instruction can shift to vocabulary and comprehension. It is also important for EAL/D students to use their home language resources during this process (eg translated word charts, bilingual dictionaries and same-language peers) to support the comprehension of English text.
Partner Reading
Students are paired and assigned passages to read together. The readings are written at the student’s instructional level and each partner takes turns reading paragraphs, pages or chapters at a time. They must take turns and adjust their reading speeds when needed to stay together.
A guiding hypothesis is that positive interdependence (instances where one child can provide assistance and another needs assistance) promotes social cooperation and on-task behavior in partner reading. This hypothesis has been tested in several ways and some support was found.
Teacher structure (the degree to which teachers impose a structured interaction by providing basic script instruction and monitoring the activity) was found to be associated with higher levels of on-task behavior. In addition, teacher strategy (e.g., pairing children who are both capable readers or matching a high ability child with a low ability child) was also a factor. These pair-making strategies were linked to different patterns of on-task behavior and social cooperation.
Text-Based Comprehension
Many adolescent students struggle with comprehending text, especially when reading narrative texts such as stories. This is a complex task that requires both the ability to decode words and the understanding of meaning, and it can be impacted by a variety of factors. For example, it is thought that personal interest in the topic or subject area, and a student’s prior knowledge of the domain or topic are important to comprehension. Traditional measures of comprehension include recall and recognition tasks that measure explicit text-based information, application or factual questions that ask readers to make inferences from the text, and transfer tasks that require the reader to integrate the new material with their own knowledge base.
In line with the Simple View of Reading (SVR), studies have found that lexical-level metrics such as word frequency and concreteness predict unique variance in reading comprehension, over and above person-level factors. In addition, research external to discourse processing has found that indices of emotional charge in the text may facilitate situation model formation and support comprehension by facilitating the integration of novel information with the reader’s existing knowledge.