Reading intervention is an essential tool for students who struggle with literacy acquisition. Research-based reading interventions are a critical component of literacy instruction and have helped many struggling readers overcome their academic challenges.
Reading intervention focuses on building the components of reading, including phonemic awareness and alphabetic principle/phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. These skills work together and even a small gap in one can be debilitating.
Phonological Awareness
Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate the spoken parts of words and sentences. It includes the skills of rhyme recognition, alliteration, sentence segmentation, and identification of initial phonemes in a word (sounding out letters).
Research shows that children who have strong phonological awareness are better readers. Moreover, they are more likely to learn to read than students who struggle with phonological awareness.
To improve phonological awareness in your classroom, start with simple activities that require no prep. Try asking your students to talk with their peers in a small group, but only in a robot voice that breaks down each word into its sounds. This will force them to slow down their speech and think about the individual sounds in each word.
Once students have mastered those basic activities, they should be ready to move on to more sophisticated tasks like blending and segmenting syllables and onset-rimes. Edmentum’s K-12 diagnostic-driven reading intervention program, Exact Path, incorporates systematic phonological awareness instruction that follows the science of reading best practices.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary is the foundation of reading comprehension and is an essential component for students to access grade level text. Research indicates that a strong vocabulary is directly related to reading achievement; however, many students have a limited vocabulary. This can cause them to struggle when encountering unfamiliar words in their reading and makes it more challenging to understand what they read.
Explicit instruction that teaches new words is essential to improving students’ vocabulary and comprehension. Teachers can use Marzano’s six steps for teaching new vocabulary to ensure that students are learning and retaining the words they are exposed to. These include an easy-to-understand definition, multiple examples and nonexamples of the word in context, brief discussion opportunities, practice opportunities and checks for understanding.
Teach your students to use context clues when they encounter unfamiliar words and help them become word detectives. Additionally, be sure to teach your students about antonyms, synonyms, and false cognates (for example, pan is a cooking device but also means bread). This can support their understanding of the meanings of unfamiliar words.
Reading Comprehension
Reading comprehension is the ability to understand what you read. It requires the skills to decode words, understand vocabulary and syntax, apply your own background knowledge, parse text structure and genre, and monitor understanding as you read.
In studies examining the effects of reading comprehension intervention, some programs report small to moderate gains on standardized tests. However, these standardized measures only capture very limited and specific pieces of what makes up reading comprehension.
Specifically, the research suggests that reading comprehension instruction that targets language-based skills through text-based discussions of grade-level informational science texts improves students’ word recognition, inferencing and synthesis of information across larger text sections (as measured by proximal progress probe measures).
Approaches to teaching general comprehension strategy instruction that involve training in multiple strategies have also been found effective. These include text-based discussion and questioning, writing about texts and passages, instructional practices that support student engagement with the texts they are reading and incorporating a variety of different types of texts into classroom activities.
Reading Fluency
If students struggle with fluency, they may spend too much time decoding words rather than understanding what the text says. Explicit instruction in fluency can help. Be sure to focus on both rate (speed) and other components of fluency (accuracy, phrasing, expression).
Recent studies have found that reading fluency is highly predictive of reading comprehension. However, we need to continue examining how different aspects of reading fluency interact with one another to better understand how to support students’ development.
Several studies have shown that strategies for improving oral reading fluency, such as modeling, repeated timed readings, and goal setting with feedback, are effective. When choosing oral reading fluency tasks, it is important to select texts that are at the learners’ grade level and to provide frequent opportunities for practice with appropriate prosodic features (rhythm, intonation, stress patterns of syllables). These should be natural-sounding so that children enjoy the task and want to keep practicing. Using a stopwatch to time and graph the results can be motivating for students.