Reading intervention is an instructional approach designed to promote literacy for students with below-grade-level reading skills. It is often implemented in a multi-tiered system of supports to meet the needs of struggling readers across varying levels of difficulty.
Explicit instruction provides clear guidance for learners. This strategy has shown to improve reading outcomes for struggling students.
Phonological Awareness
Phonological awareness is the earliest stage of reading development, when students notice and work with the individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken language. It includes abilities to blend sounds together, segment words into phonemes, and manipulate these phonemes by adding, deleting, or substituting them. It is a precursor to phonics instruction and key to decoding and reading fluency.
To assess students’ phonological awareness, conduct informal observations throughout daily classroom activities and engage in one-on-one assessments with individuals. Ask open-ended questions and provide personalised feedback to guide their growth.
As a fun brain break activity, have students in small groups talk to each other while listening for the initial sound, final sound or onset and rime of their peers’ voices. Using anchor charts or posters with the corresponding syllables and phonemes will help them identify which word family their voices belong to. Use these visual aids during class for reference and for students to access when working independently.
Vocabulary
When a student is reading, she must have sufficient vocabulary knowledge to make sense of the text. Research shows that students can be successful at grade-level reading when they have a strong vocabulary. However, many students have a limited vocabulary and struggle with comprehension of complex, grade-level texts. Explicit vocabulary instruction is one way to help students build their vocabulary and comprehension skills.
In addition to using vocabulary-building strategies, teachers should also use a range of evidence-based teaching methods. For example, students should be taught to use context clues to determine meaning, and they should be shown that words with similar spellings can have different meanings. It is also important for students to be able to see the spellings of new words, as research has shown that this helps with their reading.
This vocabulary instruction should also include explicit learning tasks that connect to the classroom curriculum and engage students in both visual and auditory ways. For example, a teacher could teach students about the importance of plants by bringing in some live plants to class and discussing them with the class.
Comprehension
In reading interventions, we provide students with explicit instruction and scaffolding to help them understand what they are reading. This includes predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing the content.
In general, most studies reported a trend of diminishing effects for standardized outcomes. This could be due to improved study quality or the changing reading profiles of participating students.
Intervention intensity including total hours of intervention, group size, and whether any aspect of the reading intervention was individualized was also examined. Interventions that were individualized often resulted in higher mean effects for both foundational and comprehension outcomes. However, the funnel plot for comprehension outcomes showed a significant asymmetry and some evidence of publication bias which could lead to inflated effect sizes. This may indicate that the impact of individualized instruction on comprehension outcomes needs further investigation.
Fluency
Reading fluency is the bridge between automatic word recognition and comprehension. Fluent readers read quickly, smoothly, and with expression. They are able to group words rapidly when reading silently or aloud and can make quick connections between their knowledge of the world and what they read.
For students to become fluent, they must have time to focus on meaning. In a 10-minute period, proficient readers who are fluent read approximately 2,000 words. At-risk students who are not fluent may only read 500 words.
In addition to using a fluency-building activity, teachers should also provide students with explicit instruction in decoding and vocabulary. Research supports the effectiveness of interventions that use a combination of phonological awareness, vocabulary, and fluency to support students in reaching grade-level standards for reading proficiency.
Among the most effective strategies for improving reading fluency is Repeated Reading (RR). RR provides an opportunity to practice, in a small-group setting, strategies that improve accuracy and reading rate. Interventions that include vocabulary or comprehension instruction have also been shown to improve student outcomes.