Reading intervention involves intensive instruction to accelerate students’ growth toward grade level reading proficiency. It is supplemental to core reading instruction and typically taught in small groups.
At home, practice phonological awareness with your children through interactive language games and activities. Encourage them to read aloud, emphasizing pronunciation and fluency. Teach vocabulary and introduce a word of the day.
Phonics
Phonics is the foundation of reading instruction. It’s the one thing that dyslexia specialists recommend for all students.
Research on phonics instruction has shown positive effects for both disabled and low-achieving students who are not disabled, especially in teaching decoding skills. Systematic synthetic phonics instruction had a stronger impact on alphabetic knowledge and word reading than did a less focused, more visual approach to teaching the letters of the alphabet.
It’s important to teach phonics in a multisensory manner. Even writing a letter in the air and sounding out the sounds as you do so counts as multisensory learning. In addition to phonics instruction, students should be practicing their spelling and vocabulary development using connected grade level texts. When students have the decoding skills necessary to read unfamiliar text, any passage becomes accessible. This empowers them to take their learning to the next level. Getting there is a big step, and takes time. But it’s a step worth taking!
Fluency
Fluency is reading smoothly, accurately, and with expression. Research shows that fluent readers comprehend better than struggling readers. To become fluent, children need to practice decoding, develop vocabulary, and read extensively in a variety of materials.
Explicitly teaching developing readers how to read fluently is one of the most powerful and effective interventions we can offer. In this video, learn how to plan and deliver a comprehensive reading fluency intervention that provides explicit instruction in the areas of phonological awareness, decoding, spelling, and vocabulary.
The first step in this reading fluency intervention is to establish a baseline with a simple fluency screener (covert timing) that determines how many words they can read correctly in a minute. From there, students engage in several activities that help them build word-level fluency and paragraph-level fluency. These activities include paired repeated reading, group reading with a model, and peer-mediated guided repeated reading. Using these strategies helps students improve their reading speed, accuracy, and expression.
Comprehension
Comprehension is a series of cognitive processes that helps readers extract meaning from texts. Unlike decoding and fluency, comprehension requires the reader to understand the meaning of words and to link new information to prior knowledge.
It is important to teach comprehension strategies in addition to helping students develop phonics and fluency. These skills will help students better understand the text and make inferences.
Developing comprehension skills often involves social and imitation learning. Teachers model strategies for students through think-alouds and provide opportunities for guided practice. Teachers also provide quality feedback and gradual release of responsibility to students as students become proficient with the strategies.
Teachers can support students by implementing a number of comprehension strategies, including questioning, visualizing, monitoring/clarifying, inferring, and summarizing. Additionally, teachers can encourage comprehension by exposing students to grade level texts that are appropriately challenging. They should also break larger pieces of informational text into manageable sections. Additionally, building morphological awareness by teaching prefixes and suffixes can help students pull apart and define unfamiliar words that do not follow traditional patterns.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary is the toolbox students use to unlock the meaning of what they read. It includes both receptive and productive vocabulary, the latter defined as words that one knows or recognizes in a context and whose general and intended meanings are known.
The research is clear: Without explicit vocabulary instruction, struggling students will struggle to comprehend what they read. Students from disadvantaged homes arrive in school with oral vocabularies that are several times smaller than those of their peers, and this gap widens throughout the years.
Clinicians should consider ways to boost student attention and awareness of vocabulary. One strategy is to incorporate vocabulary lessons that correlate with other subjects, such as science and social studies. Another approach is to encourage teachers and clinicians to talk about the target words in their interaction with students, for example, by asking students to explain concepts that they encounter in texts or other classroom activities. Another opportunity is to focus on morphological awareness, teaching students the different elements that make up words (prefixes, suffixes, and roots). This knowledge will help students better understand how new words are formed.