Reading intervention involves intensive or targeted lessons to accelerate students’ progress in reading. It may focus on one or more of the five essential components of reading: phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle or phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.
Build fluency with paired oral reading and repeated passages. Teach prosody, such as intonation, volume, smoothness, and phrasing, to help kids read more expressively.
Phonological Awareness
The ability to hear the separate sounds in words is a necessary prerequisite to learning to read. This skill is called phonological awareness. Children who have good phonological awareness are much more likely to be successful readers. Research has shown that a student’s level of phonological awareness correlates with their oral reading score.
Students who struggle with reading have less developed phonological awareness. The phonological processor in our brains works automatically when we listen and speak, but recognizing the sound patterns of written words is not automatic for young children. It takes practice.
Explicit phonological awareness instruction is one of the most effective reading interventions for students who are struggling. Edmentum’s K-12 diagnostic-driven program, Exact Path, provides explicit phonological awareness instruction in a research-based manner that follows the Science of Reading best practices. It includes activities like rhyming, sentence segmentation, and identifying onset and rime.
Vocabulary
One of the five core aspects of reading, vocabulary is the set of words that students use to understand and interpret texts. For students struggling with literacy, reading interventions can help to build vocabulary skills and improve comprehension.
Teachers can support vocabulary instruction by teaching words intentionally using a variety of strategies, such as providing a context for the word, creating Venn diagrams to display similarities and differences between similar words, or conducting word association activities. The most important factor in improving vocabulary is exposure to new words through reading materials, conversations, and experiences.
For example, a study conducted by Nash and Snowling found that 7- to 8-year old children who received vocabulary intervention through dictionary definitions or contextual clues using semantic maps made immediate gains in the taught words. However, the children who were taught contextual clues using semantic maps maintained their expressive vocabulary knowledge longer than those who only received dictionary definitions. This supports the importance of high-dosage vocabulary intervention for students who are struggling with literacy.
Comprehension
Comprehension is the reader’s ability to understand what they read. Children who comprehend can visualize stories, anticipate what will happen next, or make inferences. They can also answer questions about what they read and explain it to others.
Comprehensive reading interventions typically aim to strengthen a student’s understanding of the text and its meaning by providing targeted small group instruction and individualized assessment. This approach supports students with a range of needs, including those who are unable to decode words, but can read with sufficient fluency and vocabulary.
One study that provided comprehension-focused intervention found that a text-processing strategy improved vocabulary, inferencing, and listening comprehension performance of middle grade struggling readers. However, the results on a standardized measure that required students to integrate their own knowledge with information from the text did not improve as expected. This is likely because the intervention did not address the way that students activate, retrieve, and integrate this knowledge.
Fluency
Developing fluency is critical to the reading process. Without it, students focus more on decoding words and less on understanding the meaning of text.
Fluency instruction begins with naming letters and sounds, progressing to word reading, and then reading phrases, sentences, and passages. Watch as a reading coach models fluency skills for students in the classroom.
Many research-based reading intervention strategies build fluency, including Repeated Reading (RR). RR involves students practicing a passage of text with a teacher and then reading it on their own. This strategy has been found to improve accuracy, rate, and comprehension. Passage previews, goal setting and corrective feedback are key components to RR.
For a fun way to practice pacing and expression, engage students in Reader’s Theater. Students can take on different roles in a play or story and read aloud to each other with expressiveness, focusing on maintaining a smooth rhythmic flow of words. This also allows students to hear how a fluent reader sounds.