Reading intervention helps students who need extra support to reach grade level. It focuses on building the essential components of reading such as phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension.
Districts using a RTI/MTSS framework use effective universal Tier 1 strategies to establish the foundation for literacy instruction. For struggling readers, they use targeted Tier 2 interventions to address skill gaps.
Phonological Awareness
Phonological awareness is the ability to hear and work with the sound structures of words. It encompasses skills like rhyming, syllable segmentation, and alliteration (a repetition of the same sound at the beginning of multiple words such as cat-hat).
Students with poor phonological awareness tend to perform poorly on reading screening measures and may need more intensive instruction in smaller groups or one-on-one. Research shows that most kindergarten and first grade students can rhyme, but they typically only develop the ability to separate words into onset-rime and individual phonemes in later grades.
To help strengthen these early sound structure skills try this active small group phonological awareness intervention brain break: Tell your students they can talk to each other for a few minutes but ONLY in a robot voice that breaks the words down into their individual sounds. Encourage them to talk slowly and segment each word into their individual sounds as they say it.
Fluency
When students do not develop fluency, they become unable to bridge the gap between decoding and comprehension. They may read words and sentences with choppy and halting speech and struggle to make sense of what they have read. This can lead to frustration and a dislike of reading.
Fluency is the ability to read rapidly and accurately. Proficient readers can read at least 200 words a minute silently and with comprehension. At-risk readers can only read about 50 words a minute and may not understand what they have read.
A student’s oral reading fluency is measured by their words-correct-per-minute (WCPM). Typically, students are asked to read a grade level passage for one minute and the teacher tally how many correct words they say. The student’s WCPM is then averaged over two or three unpracticed readings of the same passage. These readings are then compared to oral reading fluency norms.
Comprehension
Reading comprehension is what allows kids to access the content of written text and learn from it. It’s also what makes reading enjoyable, and helps turn kids into lifelong readers.
Comprehension involves constructing and monitoring a mental model of what is being read, and it’s a complex process. It requires integrating background knowledge and new information with inferred messages, establishing local coherence across sentences, and applying strategies to repair comprehension breakdown. Educators can support students’ comprehension development by providing instruction in these five core components of literacy:
A key element of comprehension intervention is getting children to think deeply about what they read. One way to do this is by encouraging them to participate in class discussions, such as those led by a U.S. Marine who visited a Park Street Elementary School as part of the Partnership in Education program sponsored by the Navy/Marine Corps Reserve Center Atlanta. These discussions help students develop higher-level thinking skills by promoting critical and aesthetic thoughts about the text.
Oral Reading
Educators can help students improve their oral reading skills by using an evidence-based practice known as guided oral reading. This involves the teacher reading a passage to the student, who then takes turns reading sections of the text. During this process, the teacher provides support and modeling. This can be done during small-group instruction or as part of a reading intervention program.
Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) is the ability to read words quickly, accurately and with proper prosody, or intonation and rhythm. ORF is a crucial factor in literacy and learning.
A recent study found that a peer-mediated, experimentally derived oral reading fluency treatment increased the generalization of the target student’s ORF to novel, low-word-overlap passages (Habrouck & Tindal, 2012). This is especially significant because the students used in this study were first-grade peers who were well-trained to implement the intervention. This suggests that, in addition to the immediate effects observed on ORF with the passages used for progress monitoring, generalization to novel, low-word-overlap oral reading fluency probes may be a critical measure of the effectiveness of an academic intervention.