Reading intervention is an effective supplemental instruction strategy for students reading below grade level. Incorporated within the Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS), it offers intensive targeted instruction to help struggling readers accelerate their reading skills and achieve grade level literacy.
Build comprehension skills by having students read aloud to one another, or have them participate in small group discussions about stories and texts. Explicit instruction also helps, guiding students with clear direction and scaffolding their learning.
Phonological Awareness
Explicit instruction in phonemic awareness is essential for all learners especially students with dyslexia and speech/language disorders. Explicit phonemic awareness instruction can help students develop the foundation for decoding and reading skills by teaching them to identify speech sounds and pronounce those sounds correctly.
To assess phonological awareness, Speech-language Pathologists (SLPs) use tasks that target rhyming, alliteration, onset-rime, blending and segmentation. The early phonological awareness skill levels are typically easier for children to acquire as they learn about the relationship between letters and their sound representations.
Research indicates that children who have poorer phonological awareness scores are less proficient in their word reading. In fact, kindergarten phonological awareness scores were more strongly correlated with first-grade letter identification than they were with second-grade word reading. This may be partly due to the fact that the more advanced phonological awareness skills, such as syllable and phoneme segmentation, are more important for reading development than is basic blending of sounds to form words.
Decoding
Developing strong decoding skills is one of the first steps on the reading journey. Without it, it’s difficult to move on to other literacy skills like comprehension and writing.
To develop decoding skills, children must be able to match letters on the page with sounds they hear in everyday speech. This process is known as phonics, and it’s an essential component of Reading intervention.
When implementing phonics instruction, it’s important to follow a clear scope and sequence. It’s also necessary to incorporate interactive, multimodal practice that engages students through hands-on, fun activities.
Additionally, it’s critical to provide explicit decoding instruction that includes a survey of students’ current decoding ability to determine what skills they should be learning next. Learn more about the decoding assessment process in this blog post. Encouraging students to read a wide range of texts and reading across genres will also help develop decoding skills. Exposing them to unfamiliar words in a variety of settings will make it easier for them to recognize these words when they see them written on the page later.
Fluency
Fluency makes reading-and as a result, learning-easier. When students are fluent readers, they recognize words automatically and read them smoothly, and when reading aloud, their voice sounds natural rather than choppy. The National Reading Panel suggests focusing on improving reading fluency as an early intervention strategy.
When a student’s oral reading fluency (or the number of words they can read correctly in one minute) is below grade level, this is an indication that they have difficulty decoding words accurately and automatically. Oftentimes, this is a sign that they need explicit phonics instruction to catch up to grade level.
For a quick and easy way to assess reading fluency, time students while they read an on-grade-level assessment passage from the classroom or textbook. Use a stopwatch and record their performance, graphing their results over the course of several practice sessions. Children enjoy this activity and are often surprised by their improvement. In addition, re-reading of short passages is an effective fluency strategy.
Comprehension
Students who have good comprehension skills are able to read and understand texts at a level that is appropriate for their grade. Comprehension skills also include the ability to answer questions about the text, make inferences and draw conclusions.
Effective reading comprehension instruction must be responsive and target specific needs and abilities. For example, some students may have trouble with a particular aspect of comprehension such as visualizing. To address this, students can be asked to sketch an image of what they are reading in order to better understand, recall, and apply their knowledge of the topic.
Another component of impactful comprehension instruction is building morphological awareness through the use of prefixes, suffixes and base words. This helps students understand that some words have traditional patterns while others do not and allows them to differentiate between phonological and semantic cues in word recognition. Students can also be taught matrices that cross letter-sound relationships and word meanings (Cartwright et al, 2020). This allows students to shift their attention between complex decoding and meaning construction processes as they work.