Reading intervention helps students who are struggling with literacy. These students require a lot of practice to master their skills, and they need to be taught this practice in an efficient way.
Using progress monitoring tests, teachers can identify skills that need to be retaught. This could include teaching phonological awareness, phonics, fluency and vocabulary.
Phonics
Phonics is the ability to recognize and decode letters and their sounds. This is the foundation for reading and spelling skills. Students learn phonics by practicing the two components of a syllable: the onset and the rime. They also practice spelling words to reinforce their understanding of letter-sound relationships.
FastBridge provides teachers with a variety of strategies and resources that help them implement phonics instruction effectively. These lessons are organized into the five domains identified in the National Reading Panel Report (2000).
Research shows that early and frequent exposure to phonics is critical to developing strong reading skills. To ensure that students are getting the phonics instruction they need, a teacher should assess and reteach on a regular basis. Teachers should use a universal screener, such as a standardized assessment like MAP or iReady. Then, if the student is not progressing on the screener, a diagnostic assessment should be administered to determine where the student needs intervention.
Fluency
Reading fluency involves the development of automatic word recognition in connected text, which can free readers’ attention to comprehend meaning. This is why researchers support the instructional approach of “wide reading”: students read many texts at their grade level and practice skills in books and passages (i.e., connected text).
Screening with an oral reading fluency measure can identify students in need of explicit instruction in word recognition. If students are below-grade-level in accuracy but on-grade-level in rate, they should be placed into a phonics-focused intervention group aligned to a phonics scope and sequence.
Teachers can build and reinforce their students’ reading fluency with activities that include wide reading of informational and narrative texts, paired or group reading of short passages, and shared reading with synchronized highlighting to monitor progress. They can also build students’ prosody, or the intonation, stress, and rhythm of spoken text, with activities such as reader’s theater and nursery rhymes.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary is the foundation for reading comprehension. It strengthens the connections between phonological awareness and phonics by enhancing recognition of words’ sounds and helping readers discern nuances in word structures, as well as to apply phonics rules. It also helps students understand the meanings of unfamiliar words.
Research supports explicit vocabulary instruction that includes presenting an easy-to-understand definition, giving nonexamples and examples of the target word, prompting brief discussions, and providing multiple practice opportunities. The vocabulary instruction should be systematically taught, cumulative, diagnostic, and responsive to students’ needs.
Students typically acquire a wide vocabulary through extensive reading and rich language interactions. However, this route is inefficient for many struggling readers. By grade four, their scores in word recognition and meaning fall a year below expected levels, a phenomenon known as the fourth-grade slump (Chall, 1990). This is why it is important for teachers to explicitly teach vocabulary skills and to integrate them with other subjects.
Comprehension
Comprehension is a complex process that involves interpreting and understanding the meaning of what we read. It is the ultimate goal of reading and allows us to visualize stories, anticipate what will happen next, make inferences, and laugh at jokes.
Readers bring a diverse set of cognitive abilities, language knowledge and skills, background knowledge, motivations, interests, and social experiences to the task of comprehending a text. This is why comprehension instruction needs to be individualized and contextualized for each student.
Effective comprehension instruction teaches students strategies to use in the moment while reading to make sense of text and build their confidence and independence. Lesson plans should be explicit, systematic, cumulative, diagnostic and responsive to student needs. Lessons should incorporate reading strategies such as questioning, predicting, making connections, writing summaries and character maps to help readers understand the meaning of the text. Teachers should provide opportunities for students to apply these strategies in the context of a real-world text and to engage in discussions with peers.