Reading intervention addresses the main areas that students need to develop to read well: phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Students participate in individualized instruction at their instructional level in small groups.
Teachers use standardized assessments to monitor student progress and make informed decisions about who receives which reading interventions. This helps ensure that all students are getting effective and evidence-based instruction.
Phonics
Children need to learn the sound-letter correspondence of the alphabet letters so they can sound out and read (decode) new words. This approach is most effective when it begins in kindergarten or first grade. It is most successful when students who are struggling with reading are taught phonics one-to-one or in small groups with trained teachers. Studies have shown that phonics interventions are effective, especially when they involve intensive support and review.
For older students, phonics allows them to tackle unfamiliar words in a way that is much faster than relying on memory or context. It also empowers them to use their decoding skills to break words into syllables and figure out the sounds in those syllables. These nonsense words allow students to practice this.
This reading intervention uses a direct tie to i-Ready Assessment to help educators identify their students needing extra practice in decoding and blending. Its clear teacher scripting and consistent routines makes it a great choice for interventionists, classroom teachers, paraprofessionals or tutors to deliver the right instruction for each student.
Fluency
Reading fluency involves the ability to read quickly and accurately at a conversational pace, with appropriate prosody or expression. Students who lack reading fluency often make mistakes when reading, read too slow or miss important details in the text, and struggle with understanding what they have just read.
Research has found that many interventions can help students develop reading fluency. Oral rereading with feedback, passage previews, modelling and goal setting have all been found to be effective. Many studies have also shown that a repeated reading (RR) approach is highly effective for improving both the rate and accuracy of student reading.
The RR approach involves a teacher guiding students to practice reading short passages several times in a row while being monitored and corrected for accuracy and phrasing. This type of individualized instruction is particularly effective for students who need to improve their reading fluency. However, single-case studies examining the effect of fluency interventions on comprehension have used proximal measures of comprehension that do not always reflect true or complete comprehension.
Vocabulary
To make sense of the words they read, students need a wide range of vocabulary knowledge. However, many students have underlying weaknesses in their word knowledge, making it difficult to understand grade-level text. Explicit intervention strategies for developing vocabulary and word learning skills are key for supporting comprehension in reading.
To support students’ learning of vocabulary, teachers must provide multiple opportunities for exposure and practice activities. This is critical because students often need 15-20 exposures to a new word in order to transfer it into long term memory.
Using explicit instructional routines to teach words, including morphology (roots and combining forms, prefixes and suffixes), supports vocabulary learning and retention. Teachers should also incorporate Tier 2 words into vocabulary instruction—these are the “bricks” that students will encounter across content areas and will help build a strong foundation for understanding texts.
Watch this video from Richard Capone, CEO and co-founder of Let’s Go Learn, as he provides insight on the connection between a student’s vocabulary knowledge and their reading comprehension and academic testing performance.
Comprehension
Students must be able to understand and interpret what they read. This is an important reading skill that often gets overlooked. It requires a wide range of skills, including sensory processing (e.g., hearing what’s being said), language skills, memory, and attention. Children with neurodevelopmental disabilities may find comprehension a more challenging skill to develop because of differences in how they process sensory information and use their language and memory.
Comprehension instruction should occur in conjunction with decoding and vocabulary instruction. Using a gradual release approach, Literacy How offers reading comprehension lessons to help all students reach the next level of understanding while still practicing their basic skills. Comprehension lessons include predicting, questioning, clarifying and summarizing to support all learning styles. They also include activities to build background knowledge, activate prior knowledge and teach text structure. These skills are essential to the success of all students in their ability to make sense of what they read.