Additional Intervention Resource |
Teachers,
Welcome to the resource landing page for ELA/reading interventions. Please note that some general guidance has been provided below to help you navigate your decision-making process as you choose interventions appropriate for your students.
The best, first action toward determining your intervention is it listen to your student read.
As you consider appropriate and strategic interventions for your students, here a few things to remember:
1. Not every reading problem is a fluency problem. Reading is a complex process and you need to determine which skill to remediate before the student is going to make adequate progress. In most cases, fluency is only a symptom of a underlying reading problem. Be smart and be a detective! Listen to your student read. Actively make note of their errors then assess your reader using the appropriate diagnostic tool. These tools can be found in the assessment section of this website.
Here is a very general rule to follow when determine how best to intervene:
A. If the reader is struggling to read every work, is difficult to listen to, meaning that the reading is slow, laborious, full of errors at the word level, then investigate a decoding (phonics) deficit. Anything below 90% accuate should trigger a phonics assessment.
B. If the reader is HIGHLY accurate but has a slow reading rate, remediate with fluency interventions. You want your reader to be smooth and expressive but not a speed reader. The key is to ensure that your reader is making meaning along with reading the text. Fluency interventions can occur during small group and one-on-one instruction and are not normally grounds for an RTI referral.
C. If the reader is fluent but has very little comprehension of the text, then intervene with vocabulary and comprehension strategies. Many readers do not understand that reading is about making meaning and NOT just reading the words on the page. Make sure to question your reader as they read the text, asking questions about the text that are age-appropriate and text-appropriate.
2. Concerning phonics interventions; students who have a large number of decoding errors when reading may not necessarily have difficulty with their knowledge of phonic. Instead, they may simply misunderstand the overall purpose of reading. For whatever reason, they may not realize that reading is supposed to make sense, and instead see it as an exercise in making sounds or calling words to please the teacher. In this case, intervention must focus on the overall goal of reading: meaning. Phonics falls under the visual cueing sytem. If students are unable to produce the correct sounds for letters or letter combinations, they should benefit from phonics interventions. But first and foremost, students should understand that meaning is the overall goal of reading.