Reading intervention is a program that helps students who are struggling with reading. It offers small-group instruction, student reading materials and a research-proven curriculum.
Comprehension: Children who comprehend what they read can visualize stories, understand jokes and make inferences. They also use their background knowledge to connect with text.
Providing different types of progress monitoring may improve reading outcomes for children who are struggling. For example, a measure sensitive to decoding growth may be more effective for a child with SWRD than a measure sensitive to vocabulary or comprehension growth.
Phonological Awareness
In reading intervention, phonological awareness refers to students’ ability to hear the individual sounds in words (phonemes). Phonological awareness is an essential part of learning to read as it helps children understand how the sounds in words map onto letters. It also allows them to blend and segment the smallest units of sound in a word (e.g., onset-rime or the last sound in the word goat), and it allows them to recognize rhyming words.
Teaching phonological awareness starts with listening activities. It continues with rhyming activities and breaking down compound words. It also includes clapping out syllable counts in words and singing nursery rhymes.
In addition, phonological awareness is needed for decoding and encoding, two processes that are critical in literacy development. Decoding involves relating a written representation of a verbal word to its sounds, while encoding is the reverse, identifying the sounds in a word and mapping them to letters. For early skills, the Toothy phonological awareness tasks are great for teaching syllable merging, syllable segmentation, initial phoneme identification, final phoneme identification and rhyming.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary is an important component of reading. Studies show that students with high vocabulary scores tend to have good reading comprehension, while students with low vocabularies struggle (Nagy & Scott, 2000).
Teachers can teach words through explicit instruction by providing student-friendly definitions, examples and nonexamples of the word, brief discussion opportunities, and repeated exposure and practice. Students can also learn new words through context — that is, from the clues provided in the text that help readers guess the meaning without relying on a dictionary. This can be easier in expository, nonfiction texts than in narrative text.
Some research shows that combining vocabulary instruction with an oral academic language promotion such as storytelling can improve students’ receptive picture and definitional vocabulary performance. However, it is important to note that many of the vocabulary intervention studies do not report on retention of taught words. This is a gap that needs to be addressed.
Comprehension
Good reading comprehension is the big payoff of all that work children do to decode words, build their vocabulary, and learn about language. It’s what lets them visualize a story, connect new information to their prior knowledge, and fill in gaps with inferences.
Comprehension is multifaceted and influenced by many different factors, including background knowledge, vocabulary, cognitive processes, and text structure and organization. Our STARI curriculum includes comprehension instruction that is focused on a number of these areas. We teach open-ended questions that encourage children to talk about their thinking as they read.
In addition, we know that fluency and decoding are key factors in comprehension. Research shows that kids who struggle with decoding have trouble comprehending, as they use all of their attention and cognitive resources just to blend together letter sounds. Our phonics-focused curriculum ensures that students build both decoding and fluency skills, which allows them to devote more of their energy and attention to understanding what they read.
Oral Reading
Oral reading is important for students in the early stages of learning to read. It helps build vocabulary, decode unfamiliar words, and increase fluency.
To improve oral reading skills, teachers can implement a variety of evidence-based strategies. One example is repeated reading, in which the teacher selects a short passage at the student’s level and asks them to read it multiple times. Teachers can monitor the student’s progress by recording how long it takes them to read and marking each time they make a mistake.
Other assessment methods include one-minute timed reading and cold reading, in which the student reads a passage they’ve never seen before. These assessments are often paired with running records, in which the evaluator keeps a detailed record of each error made during a reading and also tracks self-corrections. This allows the evaluator to get a more holistic picture of the child’s reading performance.