Reading intervention is intensive, personalized instruction to help students who need extra support with their reading. It is one part of a school’s RTI or Multi-Tiered System of Support process.
The research on reading intervention shows positive effects for students in upper elementary grades on standardized foundational and comprehension reading outcomes. However, few studies examined multicomponent interventions or group sizes that vary by student needs.
Explicit Instruction
Explicit instruction is teacher-led, interactive instruction in which teachers explain content or skills using clear and unambiguous language followed by teacher modeling and scheduled opportunities for practice. This is a teaching approach that has been shown to be effective for students with LDs.
Comprehension is an orchestrated product of linguistic and cognitive processes that interact with a text, its context, and the reader’s prior knowledge, skills, and beliefs. It is important for students to have sufficient background knowledge and reading proficiency to understand grade-level text.
Explicit instruction can be used to teach students the reading strategies that are most relevant to their needs, including questioning, visualizing, monitoring/clarifying, inferring and summarizing. Explicit instruction also can be used to build phonological awareness, phonics, and literacy vocabulary. This includes naming and recognizing upper and lowercase letters, sorting consonant sounds, blending sounds to form words, and decoding multi-syllable words. It can also be used to build morphological awareness by teaching the meanings of prefixes, suffixes, and base words.
Repeated Reading
Repeated reading is a simple but highly effective strategy for improving students’ fluency (the speed at which they read with accuracy and expression) and comprehension. Students with poor fluency have trouble comprehending what they read and are prone to miscues. Originally, repeated reading was geared towards students with disabilities that impact fluency but recent research indicates that most students can benefit from this strategy.
In timed repeated reading, a student reads a passage a set number of times to improve their reading rate which leads to improved fluency and comprehension. It can be done alone or in a group, and it is often done with a stop watch to allow for the student to see their growth over time.
Another way to use this reading strategy is through assisted repeated reading in which a teacher or peer models the re-reading of a text. Students then practice reading chorally with each other over the course of several re-readings.
Guided Oral Reading
Students practice reading aloud passages that are at their instructional level. They are listened to and guided by the teacher or a peer as they read to improve their reading fluency. This strategy can also be called guided repeated oral reading, neurological impress, paired reading, shared reading and collaborative or assisted oral reading (NRP, 2012).
The goal is for students to move to a point in the text where they are making very few errors per page so that they no longer need to focus on decoding. When this happens, the teacher can shift the focus of the lesson to comprehension skills.
Guided reading is an evidence-based approach developed in New Zealand and later expanded upon by Lesley University’s own Gay Su Pinnell and Irene Fountas. It is an effective supplemental intervention and can be found in many reading programs across the country. A recent study comparing a GR approach to explicit instruction and typical school reading instruction, found that students in the GR group performed significantly better than those in the EX group on untimed word identification.
Oral Language Development
Developing students’ spoken language is an essential component of reading instruction. Oral language development activities that target specific lexical items can help to develop the child’s vocabulary and grammatical skills, enabling them to understand more about the story they read.
Effective phonics instruction for struggling readers should go beyond decoding single-syllable words to include strategies for recognizing word parts, such as roots and affixes. It should also incorporate strategies for encoding multisyllabic words, such as blending syllables and using consonant clusters, to improve decoding accuracy.
Studies of vocabulary and oral language interventions for struggling readers show that these approaches have large impacts on reading outcomes, with an average impact of six months’ additional progress. However, the impact on comprehension remains small. This may be due to the small number of studies that address these areas and use unstandardized measures such as skill inventories or informal diagnostic measures closely aligned with the intervention. Additionally, the effects of these interventions are influenced by the length and intensity of the program.