Reading intervention is one component of a school’s response to intervention (RTI) or multi-tiered support system process. It focuses on providing intensive, personalized instruction to students who struggle with reading.
Reading intervention strategies vary, but generally involve reteaching and practice to strengthen skills. Students who struggle with phonics may need a phonics program to learn letter sounds, while those struggling with comprehension may need vocabulary instruction.
Group interventions
One of the most popular methods for reading intervention is to group students together based on their level and needs. This allows teachers to provide targeted instruction for multiple students at the same time. There are a number of evidence-based programs available that can help educators plan and implement effective small group instruction for struggling readers.
Phonics reading groups focus on building foundational skills such as phonemic awareness and phonics. This includes teaching students to isolate and identify sounds in words (phonemes) and the relationships between these sounds and their corresponding grapheme/letter combinations (grapheme-phoneme correspondences).
The blended reading group supports student progress by helping them transition from learning to decode to becoming fluent readers. This group teaches students to read more complex texts and helps them build a stronger understanding of text structure through activities that include analyzing themes, drawing inferences, and connecting the text content to their personal experiences.
Individual interventions
Individual reading interventions offer students more individualized attention and provide teachers with the opportunity to adapt instruction to each student’s learning needs. These interventions are typically delivered outside of core instruction, and can be provided in a classroom or by a reading intervention specialist. These strategies can be used with students in any grade level, but are most effective in lower grades.
Research has found that most students with reading difficulties can make significant gains in their reading skills if they receive more instruction and intensive support. Studies in which students received daily intervention for extended periods of time over 16 weeks have shown that these students made large pre-post test gains in word reading, spelling, and comprehension. However, there is less knowledge about the optimum group size for intervention with older students. Generally, students in higher grades need more intensive Tier 3 interventions to close the performance gap with their normally developing peers. However, it is important to carefully consider the intensity of these interventions in terms of time and resource constraints.
Assessments
Educators need a range of assessments to get a complete picture of student reading skills and needs. Screening, diagnostic, progress monitoring and summative assessments all play a role in getting the data educators need to make informed decisions about how they will group students for instruction, how they will differentiate instruction, and whether or not a certain curriculum is effective.
Screening assessments, such as universal screeners, provide a snapshot of students’ skill levels and help identify which children are at risk for difficulty with reading. These assessments typically are brief and efficient to administer. One type of screening assessment is a Curriculum-Based Measurement, or CBM, which uses a short criterion-referenced test that measures a student’s growth over time in specific reading skills, such as letter name and sound fluency, phoneme segmentation fluency and nonsense word reading fluency.
Diagnostic assessments, such as the Single Word Reading Inventory and the Multi-Method Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS Next), are administered to students identified by screening assessments who require a more in-depth look at their reading skills. These assessments measure a student’s performance in specific reading skills such as decoding and language comprehension to determine their specific needs.
Strategies
Students who need reading intervention may require a variety of strategies to improve their skills. Some strategies focus on specific aspects of reading, such as comprehension or phonics. Others address more general aspects of reading, such as fluency and vocabulary. For example, teaching morphological awareness, which includes prefixes, suffixes, roots, and other elements that make up words, can help students understand word structure and decoding.
For adolescent readers, it is important to focus on improving their comprehension skills. This can be done through incorporating discussion and using cognitively challenging texts that are relevant to their lives. In addition, focusing on building skills that support comprehension like academic language and perspective-taking is essential.
Individual reading interventions offer many benefits, including individualized instruction and personalized feedback. Let’s Go Learn offers tools and resources to support individualized instruction, such as diagnostic assessments and student progress monitoring. By monitoring student progress, teachers can adjust their instruction accordingly and help students achieve their learning goals.