Reading intervention is a series of strategies that educators use to support students who are struggling with literacy skills. These strategies help students close the gap between their current reading level and grade-level expectations.
Teaching students to read aloud, focusing on phonological awareness and syllable knowledge, introducing new words and introducing vocabulary through discussions can all boost comprehension skills.
Phonics
Phonics involves teaching students the relationship between sounds (phonemes) and the written spelling patterns, or graphemes, that represent them. For example, children learn that the letter n represents the sound /n/ in words like nose and nice. Phonics instruction has been shown to improve the ability of students to decode new words.
To teach phonics effectively, it’s important to have multisensory lessons that allow students to use their whole body to engage with the learning. This includes activities that involve the fingers, hands, and mouth (like tracing the letters while saying their sounds), as well as engaging with words to identify their sounds and patterns. Another effective way to build phonics skills is through a structured literacy approach that focuses on explicit, systematic, cumulative, and diagnostic instruction. This includes programs such as Fundations, Wilson Reading System, and HELPS. There have been fewer studies on this approach for older readers, but the research suggests it can still be beneficial.
Fluency
Reading fluency is a key to being able to focus on meaning when reading. Students who struggle with reading fluency often become frustrated and don’t enjoy or understand the reading process. This can negatively impact students’ lives both academically and socially.
Explicit instruction in reading fluency can help struggling readers build word-level and paragraph-level fluency skills. To identify a student’s need for explicit fluency instruction, compare his or her words-corrected-per-minute (wcpm) score on an unpracticed reading of grade-level assessment passage to oral reading fluency norms such as the Hasbrouck–Tindal oral reading fluency norms.
Student dyads took turns reading a text 1 year below their grade level to fluency criteria (180 words per minute, 10 errors or less, five comprehension questions answered correctly) for 10 min. Listeners provided error correction (sound it out, read it before and after the miscue, repeat the group of words three times fast). Students were rewarded when they reached the target criteria.
Comprehension
Good comprehension is the foundation for a reading experience. It involves building a mental representation of the text and connecting it to knowledge we already have. This can be influenced by many factors: background knowledge, vocabulary and language skills, cognitive processes, and text structure and organization.
A variety of strategies help students build comprehension skills, such as the story mapping strategy where students create a graphic organizer to understand the text on a structural level and the predicting strategy where students make predictions about what might happen in a story. Explicit instruction is important for teaching comprehension strategies, with students getting lots of guided practice and ongoing feedback to ensure that they are effective.
To address comprehension struggles, teachers can use reading assessments to determine the appropriate intervention tier for each student. For example, if Juan is able to decode words but has difficulty understanding what he’s read, it may be time to move him into Tier 3 reading intervention.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary is a core component of reading comprehension. Research shows that students who struggle to comprehend text also tend to have a limited vocabulary. Vocabulary development and instruction is a key aspect of effective literacy programs.
Vocabulary development occurs both indirectly (through incidental learning in daily oral language and listening to adults read aloud) and directly (through explicit instruction of individual words and word-learning strategies). Research suggests that teaching tricky, unfamiliar words before reading helps students develop background knowledge, which supports comprehension. Explicit instruction during reading provides essential modeling of how to clarify a word when encountering it in the text, and reinforces rereading as an effective strategy.
Explicit instruction should also include teaching the meanings of root words, prefixes and suffixes, and identifying false cognates (i.e., doctor/doctor or music/musica) as well as teaching students to use a Semantic Feature Analysis Grid to help them review and retain new vocabulary. Teachers should also incorporate vocabulary activities and word play into classroom read-alouds, and provide opportunities for students to compare and contrast new words with familiar ones.