The Importance of Reading Intervention

Students need to practice reading a lot in order to build the skills necessary for fluency and comprehension. But not every child has a regular classroom teacher to provide this crucial extra practice.

Reading intervention is when teachers notice a student has difficulty with reading and help them to improve their skills. This is done by providing targeted instruction and formative assessment using science-aligned programs.

Phonics

Having strong decoding skills is one of the key elements in becoming a proficient reader. Phonics involves teaching students the relationship between sounds and their written symbols (graphemes).

For struggling readers, phonics instruction is usually the first intervention that needs to be implemented. Using standardized or teacher-created inventories and data analysis will help teachers identify students’ phonics strengths and weaknesses so that they can tailor phonics instruction to each student’s unique needs.

One of the most important aspects of phonics is differentiating between short and long vowel sounds. This can be a challenge for many students because all vowels sound very similar, making it more difficult to distinguish them. Teaching these phonetic patterns to struggling readers will help them become more fluent as they read. For a fun and engaging way to practice these phonetic patterns, try a word slide! Have students slide their arm down while segmenting a word into its sounds and then blend them together to produce an approximate pronunciation.

Vocabulary

Research has shown that vocabulary development is a necessary component for reading success. Children grow their vocabulary mainly through incidental learning: by talking, listening to adults talk and read aloud to them, by reading extensively on their own. They add 1,000 to 4,000 words per year to their vocabularies through these indirect learning experiences.

Explicit instruction is also essential for improving students’ vocabulary knowledge. Teachers should include vocabulary instruction in classroom read-alouds and other reading activities to expose students to a variety of new words in a range of contexts. Teachers can also provide students with opportunities to practice constructing sentences that use targeted vocabulary words.

Teachers can also encourage word-learning through vocabulary games that require students to categorize a word, provide its function/purpose/defining features, a synonym and antonym, and use it in a sentence. These types of word games build students’ receptive and expressive language skills. Students can also use a dictionary to research the meanings of unfamiliar words, a strategy that builds their background knowledge and supports comprehension.

Comprehension

Reading comprehension is a vital skill for students to have, but it requires more than just decoding words and understanding what they mean. It requires students to draw upon their background knowledge, make inferences and think about what they’re reading.

This means that educators must teach students strategies and techniques for reading comprehension, and they need to do this in tandem with building phonological awareness, letter and sound recognition, decoding, blending and segmenting, and vocabulary. A comprehensive literacy program, such as Lexia Core5 Reading, helps teachers support students with explicit and systematic instruction to build all these skills.

For example, teaching children to use reading guides to help them think about a text as they read can boost their comprehension. These guides can include questions to answer or other tasks to complete while reading, such as determining the main idea of a paragraph or section. They can also help students recognize the most important ideas and summarize them.

Reading Fluency

Developing reading fluency is vital for ensuring students can comprehend the content they read. As fluent readers, students recognize words automatically, allowing them to dedicate more cognitive resources to understanding meaning and making connections between ideas. Fluent readers also read faster, which helps them retain information.

At-risk students, however, often develop decoding skills but not reading fluency. Their silent reading is slow and laborious, and they lack the confidence that proficient readers do when reading aloud.

Research shows that teaching strategies for building reading fluency is a crucial part of literacy instruction. Teachers should screen students with an oral reading fluency measure three times a year, starting in the winter of first grade.

One of the most effective ways to build reading fluency is through repeated readings of high-interest texts at a text-level appropriate pace. This can be done by assigning a passage that is at the student’s level, having them practice, and providing feedback throughout the process.

The Importance of Reading Intervention
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