Reading intervention is extra instruction that reinforces or reteaches skills students are struggling with. It usually happens in smaller groups or one-on-one, allowing teachers to adapt their teaching methods to match a student’s learning pace.
Using diagnostic assessments, educators target key areas that require improvement, such as phonemic awareness, phonics, sight word recognition, fluency, or comprehension strategies. Intensive, high-dose reading intervention is critical to closing literacy gaps.
1. Phonics
Learning phonics helps kids recognize letters and the sounds they make. This knowledge is the key to reading words and understanding text. It allows students to crack open books independently, absorb knowledge from educational materials and use writing as a creative outlet.
Systematic synthetic phonics instruction improves decoding and word recognition skills, which help with comprehension. Research shows that this type of instruction benefits children with disabilities and low-achieving students who are not disabled.
Teaching phonics is a crucial component of early reading instruction, especially for struggling students. A comprehensive review of decades of research by the National Reading Panel (2000) found that explicit, systematic phonics instruction is effective for all beginning readers.
One of the most important phonics skills is distinguishing between short and long vowel sounds. Vowels sound very similar to each other, so it takes a little longer for new students to master them than consonant sounds. This is why many teachers wait until kids have a solid grasp of consonant sounds before they move on to vowels.
2. Comprehension
Reading comprehension is a complex cognitive process. It involves constructing mental representations of the text and drawing upon past experiences to relate new information. Comprehension also requires interpreting and responding to questions about the text as well as navigating the complexities of a written text.
Research shows that effective comprehension instruction can lead to improved reading comprehension. For example, one study found that an intervention that taught students comprehension strategies resulted in significant gains on proximal measures, and smaller but still significant gains on standardized tests (Okkinga et al., 2018).
Reading intervention that teaches comprehension strategies focuses on teaching readers to ask questions and determine the main idea of a passage. It is important to teach students that some questions can be answered “right there” in the text, while others require a deeper level of understanding such as making inferences or comparing and contrasting text sections. Teachers can support students by modeling these skills through think-alouds and offering guided practice opportunities and high quality feedback.
3. Fluency
Fluency involves reading text with speed, accuracy and expression. It is a key component of vocabulary acquisition and language development, as students encounter a broader range of words in context. It builds confidence in students as readers, and this virtuous cycle leads to more reading and deeper comprehension.
Often, students have the decoding skills but struggle with reading fluency. These students read with a slow, laborious pace, and often with little expression or meaning. As a result, they may not feel confident as readers and do not enjoy reading. In addition, these students do not understand what they read because they lack a deep understanding of the meaning and structure of text. To identify students who need a fluency intervention, use a universal screener (like a grade-level assessment or the MAP reading fluency assessment) and a diagnostic assessment that differentiates between word recognition and language comprehension difficulties. Studies indicate that repeated reading interventions are highly effective for improving fluency (RR) with passage previews, teacher modeling and feedback, and goal setting.
4. Vocabulary
Vocabulary is a group of words that an individual knows and uses when speaking, listening, reading or writing. A vocabulary is also known as a lexicon or a store of words. A well-developed vocabulary helps children recognize more of the words they encounter in a text, increasing comprehension and overall reading speed.
Children learn much of their vocabulary indirectly through conversation, being read to, and reading extensively on their own. However, they may still need direct instruction to learn many words, especially those that are not part of their oral (spoken) vocabulary.
According to Graves (2006), effective strategies for teaching receptive vocabulary include providing definitional information, generating in-depth word meanings, allowing multiple exposures to new words over time, and using activities that promote repetition and rehearsal of new words. These practices are similar to those that have been shown to be effective for typically developing children in classrooms with rich vocabulary instruction. In addition, reading passages that include both target words and nontarget words are helpful for providing a variety of contexts to practice new vocabulary.