Reading intervention focuses on boosting the skills of students who are having difficulty. There are many different ways to approach this, and it is important to find the strategy that works best for each student.
Students listen to modeled fluent oral reading and practice expressive reading and intentional pausing, using echo and choral reading interventions. These help improve accuracy.
Phonics
The English alphabetic code may seem daunting to struggling readers, but the good news is that phonics instruction can help students unpack this challenging code. Proponents of evidence-based reading instruction cite decades of research showing that systematically taught, systematic, explicit phonics is the most effective approach to teaching reading.
In the past, some reading programs have strayed from this approach. For example, some programs have opportunistically taught phonics through the use of cues such as sentence context or comparing words that begin with the same sound (analogy or analytical phonics).
Fortunately, new evidence is turning the tide. A growing number of educators, parents, and scientists now agree that phonics-based instruction is the most effective for all learners, especially for students with dyslexia.
Reading Comprehension
Reading comprehension is one of the most important skills that children and adults can develop. Those who have good reading comprehension are better able to use information from different sources to solve problems. This is because reading comprehension encourages empathetic listening, logical thinking and flexible problem-solving. It also helps them understand other people’s points of view.
Strategies for reading comprehension include anticipating, questioning and summarizing. Teachers can teach these to students by providing them with graphic organizers such as Venn diagrams, story boards and mind maps. They can also ask students to pair up and read books, asking each other questions to help them understand the material they are reading.
Comprehension strategy instruction has been shown to have moderate to high effects on reading comprehension. However, students need multiple lessons to become proficient in using a new comprehension strategy. The What Works Clearinghouse recommends incorporating comprehension strategies into reading interventions to maximize their effectiveness. Interventions that focus on two or more components of reading have mixed results.
Vocabulary
The quality of a child’s reading comprehension is strongly related to his or her vocabulary. While students may learn many words indirectly as they engage daily in oral language, listen to adults read to them and read extensively on their own, teaching them both individual words and word learning strategies is important for developing reading skills.
Students need to have a wide range of vocabulary to comprehend text. Explicit instruction in vocabulary is critical for students, especially those who struggle with reading.
Explicit vocabulary instruction includes easy-to-understand definitions, multiple examples and nonexamples, brief discussions of meanings, and repetition. It also includes subject-specific vocabulary, since each discipline has its own set of essential words. Students learn vocabulary best when it is taught over an extended period of time and they are actively engaged in the process of learning it. This helps them to connect the new words with their existing knowledge. In addition, using flashcards is a powerful way to teach and reinforce vocabulary.
Summarizing
Students need to develop a strategy for determining what the main idea of a text is and what details are important. Summarizing is a great strategy because it helps readers break down information into its main points for more concise understanding.
To practice the summary strategy, have your students read a passage at their instructional level and tell them to remember everything they can. Ask them to write a list on the board of all the things they remembered. Then, ask them to suggest categories for the information on the list and divide it into those categories.
Once they have categorized the information, they can begin writing a summary microtheme. A summary microtheme is a sentence or two that expresses the main point of the text. It can be based on the title, storyline, foreshadowing, pictures, or other cues from the text. This is a great strategy to use for assessing comprehension because it provides concrete evidence that students understand the material.