Reading intervention is a key component of any school’s response to intervention (RTI) or multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) framework. It offers intensive targeted instruction to students reading below grade level.
To become proficient readers, children need a wide range of skills. Let’s break down these skills: phonological awareness, sight word recognition, word identification, and comprehension.
Phonological Awareness
Phonological awareness, or the ability to hear individual sounds in words, is a necessary skill for beginning readers. It is the foundation for decoding, blending, and word reading.
Children who have mastered phonological awareness skills can blend sounds together, take apart words into their individual sounds, recognize and identify their identity, and use these sounds to make up new words. These skills help children reduce the burden of memorization when encountering unfamiliar words while reading and spelling.
Studies have found that phonological awareness skills are the strongest predictor of students’ future success in reading. Even before students learn how to read, we can tell with a high level of accuracy whether they will become good or poor readers by the end of third grade and beyond. These predictions can be made using simple tests such as initial phoneme segmentation, syllable counting, and rhyme recognition. This is largely due to the fact that phonological awareness supports growth in printed word recognition (Good, Simmons, and Kame’enui, 2001).
Sight Word Recognition
Sight word recognition is the ability to instantly recognize words that appear frequently in text but do not follow normal letter-sound correspondences. These are called exception words or heart words, and can be taught through research-based lists (Fry and Dolch). Although some students may develop sight word recognition through a wide range of reading experiences, including independent book and word walls, most children, especially those with learning disabilities, benefit from organized instruction that centers on sound-letter mapping (Ehri, 2022).
Teach sight words through multi-sensory activities to help struggling readers connect them to the sounds, spelling patterns, and meanings of the word parts. To minimize the number of words to memorize, wait to teach high-frequency irregular sight words until learners have learned to decode simple regular words through phonics instruction. Then, use the sight word list to provide meaningful practice in context through fluency drills and dictation while reading connected texts. This provides a more meaningful approach to memorization and helps prevent students from becoming reliant on the ineffective practice of simply memorizing sight words.
Word Identification
Although some children seem to figure out the alphabetic principle without any instruction, most children—and children with reading disabilities in particular—benefit from systematic and explicit phonics and sight word recognition instruction. These lessons must focus on building students’ proficiency with letter-sound correspondences and their knowledge of the regular and irregular parts of high frequency words.
Attempts to model the processes involved in normal reading have typically emphasized eye-movement data (event-related potentials, positron emission tomography, functional magnetic resonance imaging). However, it is almost always impossible to gather large enough samples of eye movements for such experiments, so researchers have instead relied on more tractable laboratory tasks, such as speeded lexical decision and masked priming.
Research has shown that the effectiveness of phonics and word-recognition strategies is dependent on their ability to provide children with accurate knowledge of sound-symbol relations, thereby facilitating orthographic (phoneme-grapheme) mapping. These are the key elements that contribute to automatic word recognition, which leads to reading comprehension.
Comprehension
In order for students to understand what they read, they must first have the ability to identify and interpret words. If they don’t recognize individual words, then the meaning of the text is lost, and the story doesn’t make sense.
Teaching comprehension strategies such as visualizing, inferring, creating graphic organizers, and asking questions can help students gain a deeper understanding of what they read. However, it’s important to note that these strategies are not effective alone and must be taught within a context of topically-related texts.
For example, the reading intervention program Connect to Comprehension uses decodable texts and provides daily scripted lessons that integrate all components of literacy. Its approach is aligned to the science of reading and based on well-respected recommendations, including those from the National Reading Panel. The program helps students who struggle with decoding and word identification to access grade-level comprehension instruction. It also promotes the use of open-ended questions to promote metacognition.