The Importance of Reading Intervention

Reading intervention involves providing students with additional instruction to improve their reading skills. This instruction includes decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension strategies.

Intervention studies varied in the number of hours of instruction, group size, and whether individualized instruction was provided. In general, interventions that were not individualized predicted smaller effects on foundational and comprehension outcomes.

Comprehension

Good comprehension is vital if a reader wants to understand what they read, learn from it and enjoy it. It is an essential skill for reading and learning and can be enhanced through explicit instruction.

Strategies for teaching comprehension include modeling and practicing predicting, questioning, clarifying and summarizing. Teachers can also help students visualize what they read by asking them to sketch a picture of what they read in a short story or poem. This allows students to see their mental image and compare it to the author’s use of descriptive and figurative language.

The literature on reading interventions predicts small, positive effects for both foundational skills and comprehension outcomes. However, intervention effect sizes vary across the literature. Group size was a key moderator of the effect sizes for comprehension outcomes, with interventions that were implemented in smaller groups predicting larger mean effects. Additionally, some studies indicated that individualized instruction may improve both comprehension and foundational skills.

Phonics

The ability to blend sounds together and break spoken words into their constituent parts is essential for reading. When children have an understanding of the letter-sound relationship, they can decode words and read at grade level.

Teaching phonics is an integral component of literacy instruction for all learners. Research has shown that explicit and systematic phonics instruction improves the quality of children’s word reading and spelling.

Systematic synthetic phonics instruction also has a strong effect on the ability of low-achieving students with disabilities to read. These students made larger gains in their alphabetic knowledge and word reading than children who received instruction that was less focused on phonics.

If you have identified students who are below benchmark on tier 1 universal literacy screening assessments like FastBridge or DIBELS, a phonics intervention is a great place to start. Education to the Core Premium includes a research validated program that provides explicit, teacher-directed instruction to teach students the skills needed for reading success. These lessons can be delivered in small groups or to an entire classroom and are appropriate for ages 8-adult.

Vocabulary

Vocabulary refers to a reader’s store of words and their meanings. It is one of the most important aspects of reading and is a critical predictor of reading comprehension. Children who have a good vocabulary are able to visualize a story, anticipate what will happen next, and understand the context of a passage.

The research on vocabulary development and reading has shown a strong and significant correlation between the two. In fact, researchers have found that a student’s vocabulary knowledge accounts for a large amount of the variance in reading comprehension (Kamil and Hiebert, 2005).

To develop students’ vocabulary, it is important to explicitly teach individual words and their meanings with repetition and multiple exposure over time. This can be done through read alouds, discussion, and word-learning activities. It is also helpful to expose students to words in a variety of contexts and through the teaching of word parts such as roots, prefixes, suffixes, and morphology.

Fluency

As children advance through school and into higher grades they encounter more advanced content-rich texts. To be academically successful, they must be able to read and understand these texts quickly and accurately. This is referred to as reading fluency.

When students are not fluent, they need to spend more cognitive energy on decoding each word. This can make them feel overwhelmed and less motivated to practice reading. Children who are fluent enjoy reading and have a greater sense of confidence in their abilities, making them more willing to keep practicing.

Teaching strategies to improve fluency is important for children with reading disabilities. The most effective method is modeled reading, repeated reading, and rereading with appropriate prosody. Prosody is the intonation, stress, volume, smoothness and phrasing that comes with reading aloud. It can be taught by using a variety of materials such as chapter books, comics and poetry. It is also important to teach and reinforce sight words, spelling lists and new vocabulary.

The Importance of Reading Intervention
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