Identifying Students Who Need Intervention for Increasing Fluency & Comprehension
Whether you are a classroom teacher or a homeschool parent, some of the first literacy skills that a student needs to acquire are the most crucial early literacy skills: phonics (letter sounds), spelling, word recognition, reading fluency and comprehension. Reading comprehension is at the core of all other academics (yes, even math) and it is a pivotal skill that can affect them for the rest of their academic lives if reading intervention help is needed and the proper interventions and help are not available in the early elementary school years.
Research has found that poor literacy skills in phonics (letters and sounds), and struggles with reading fluency and comprehension in the early years of elementary school lead to long term problems for children. Because of what we have found in research, it is important to provide effective early approaches and intervention strategies to remedy these problems by helping students with effective literacy intervention and instruction or even peer tutoring. The research data clearly reveals that some of the early literacy problems that can result from a lack of effective early intervention.
“A child who is a poor reader at the end of the first grade has an almost 90% chance of remaining a poor reader at the end of Grade 4 (Jeul,1988) and at least a 75% chance of being a poor reader as long as they are in school (Francis et al.,1995).”
There are some simple yet effective informal literacy assessments that a parent or teacher can use in the early elementary school years to test a child who is experiencing problems with learning and may be at risk for literacy and reading struggles. Even without any type of formal or informal literacy assessments, there are some simple but effective approaches that can help a student who is showing an indication of struggling with early literacy and reading skills and would benefit from early intervention. These early language and reading skills that need assessment include problems with learning early phonics (letters and letter sounds), understanding vocabulary words, problems with reading with fluency, problems with comprehension and writing.
Helpful List of Reading Interventions for Increasing Fluency & Comprehension
Providing early literacy intervention to overcome reading struggles can require a variety of instructional approaches. Successful reading intervention in the early elementary school years requires a strategic combination of approaches like direct teaching, interesting learning activities, peer tutoring, peer interaction, individual practice, group practice and motivation. Here is a list of some simple types of intervention to consider for home settings or classroom settings while helping your child or student with literacy early literacy skills:
Read out loud:
Reading out loud is something that both you and your child should be doing frequently to practice and model fluency. Reading out loud is an effective early intervention help for your child in the early elementary school years because it forces them to really focus and work at identifying and decoding letters and the sound of the words. They are also less likely to skip a word that they don’t recognize if they are reading to an adult. If they make errors while reading to a parent or teacher, the student has access to an adult that can provide immediate intervention to help with correcting the error. Listening to an adult read out loud helps a struggling reader with early reading fluency by improving proper word pronunciation and language inflection as they listen to the adult modeling those skills.
Peer Assisted Learning Strategy (PALS):
There are many recent studies on the effects of peer tutoring and peer assisted learning as effective reading intervention for struggling readers in early elementary school. Children respond positively to peer interaction and tutoring as a form of intervention. Students who receive peer assisted tutoring while learning show significant academic progress while learning new literacy skills and receiving intervention with literacy skills that they are struggling with. The idea behind PALS is simple: two students (or siblings) work together to help one another to read an assigned text. The parent or teacher provides instruction and models the type of reading that needs to occur. The process is simple and effective: Assign one child as a “coach” and the other child as the “player”. The player reads for 5 minutes and the coach follows along and provides immediate intervention for any errors that the reader makes. After 5 minutes, the children switch roles and have the “player” become the “coach” that tutors the player through any reading struggles that they encounter. This approach is helpful because it provides effective, early instruction by using fun, activity based approaches for peer readers. It is an intensive approach because the pressure for the children to succeed is high when two students are trying to help provide intervention by tutoring one another and they want to do well in one another’s presence.
Let your child choose the reading book:
If you have an elementary school student with early reading and literacy struggles, it is far more likely that the student who is learning to read will stay engaged in the text if they like what they are reading. Insisting that a student read a book because it is “required” at that particular grade level or because you think it's an appropriate choice at the moment is a bad approach. Reading is work for a child, especially for a student who needs intervention because they are struggling with reading. There are better strategies. Just as we need motivation to go to work to bring home a paycheck, a child who is performing a task, that might be somewhat unpleasant to them, also needs a paycheck at the end of the task. The struggling student gets “paid” by success and reward at home and in school. Success is more easily gained when the task is enjoyable or something that the student wants of their own accord. The reward is found in the praise that the student receives as well as the tangible rewards that the student receives for the accomplishment.
Motivation and Reward:
While on the topic of effective motivation and reward, take some time to consider what early intervention activities or incentives that your student might find inspiring enough to work for while reading. For example: if your elementary school student loves to paint or play outside, you can offer that student free time to enjoy those activities by making them contingent on twenty minutes of reading instruction. Motivate and reward your student frequently so that they are inclined to perform the task of reading and learning. When motivation starts to waver, offer your student a bigger incentive to work toward. For example, offer your child something at the end of the day, the week or the month that matches their level of effort and achievement. Think of it as the equivalent of a monthly bonus for perfect attendance at work. Proper incentives in concert with these other approaches are highly effective.
Positive Feedback Strategies:
Providing your student with effective early reading intervention and varied instructional approaches includes helping a student by making them aware of how they are performing. Positive feedback and direct instruction are one of the most effective approaches to helping a struggling student, who is struggling to stay motivated, to work on their early literacy skills while receiving early intervention. It is unrealistic to expect that a teacher will not point out problematic areas in language, vocabulary, reading fluency and comprehension during intervention, but it should be balanced with a healthy dose of what the student is doing right as well. There should be eight or nine positive affirmations for every one correction about the problems they might be struggling with. A simple compliment like “wow, you really worked hard at sounding those words out!” can be extremely effective in providing early literacy and reading intervention for a struggling reader.
Effective Direct Instruction:
Providing effective early reading intervention and developing improved literacy in a student who is struggling with early reading skills requires individualized attention and instruction. Direct instruction is one of the best approaches to solving early literacy problems that hinder reading fluency and comprehension skills. Once the student begins to respond to early intervention and display increased fluency, these newly acquired reading skills need to be reinforced with a lot of practice. Teachers and parents can implement effective guided practice and other direct strategies and approaches as a form of early intervention by modeling the skills together with the student until they show enough understanding to practice independently at home. Repetition is the key to developing improved literacy skills. Help your student to stay motivated to work at early literacy skills and reward them every step of the way while providing early reading intervention.
Make it Do-able:
More is not always one of the best approaches when providing early reading intervention. A struggling reader who is already overwhelmed will learn more and stay motivated to learn if they are able to digest the instruction in small doses. Chunking a text refers to breaking a body of text down into smaller bits that are manageable to the struggling reader during early intervention. Chunking text is one of many approaches that is effective in helping a student with fluency and comprehension.
Make it Fun:
Early reading intervention approaches should be enjoyable for the struggling reader. Intervention help can be intensive without feeling like punishment to your student. Early reading intervention should be interactive rather than repetitive and boring to your student. There are a multitude of approaches to integrate early reading and math games, activities, art projects, and online programs with your child’s specific interests. You can implement these intervention programs while developing a successful approach to early reading intervention at home and at school.
How Lighthouse Reader Can Help with Reading Intervention
Lighthouse Reader can make early reading intervention fun. Lighthouse reader uses some of the most successful approaches and principles of early literacy interventions, some of which are mentioned above, and presents them in a customizable program that helps your struggling reader to get the help that they need when early literacy and reading intervention becomes necessary.
Your child chooses and downloads a favorite book into the reader. The reader has a feature within the program that can read to your child, or your child can read into the reader. As your child reads, they receive immediate intervention and feedback in the program with Running Record which scores the number of words correct per minute.
Lighthouse Reader makes early reading and literacy intervention easy and provides the reader with help to set personal goals and milestones that provide effective motivation to work toward a reward for completion of the goal. Your struggling reader can earn badges at each milestone and after a set number of badges, your child can enjoy the benefits of all of their hard work. This feature within the program is also a way to provide positive feedback as they earn recognition for their achievements while they receive personalized tutoring and early intervention.
One of the most helpful features of the Lighthouse Reader program is the ability to break the text down into sizable chunks that the struggling reader can easily work with. The program allows your child to break the text down by shading above and below the line of text to view one, two or three lines at a time. Each line can also be set to highlight each word as it is read or reveal one word at a time as your child reads along. For the student who requires reading intervention, this feature can remove the anxiety that can sometimes come with an overwhelming amount of text.
Peer assisted learning strategies are also available as an intervention option on Lighthouse Reader. Book chats, clubs, tournaments and other forms of social interaction are available to provide that sense of accountability and healthy competition between friends. All of these forms of intervention and social activities are monitored and controlled by parents and educators for the safety and well being of your child.
Of course, a student will always benefit from the direct instruction of a teacher or a parent as one of the most effective forms of intervention. The best praise will always come from a parent or teacher. The rewards are up to you as the educator. Lighthouse Reader can reinforce direct instruction with additional guided intervention and independent practice through the various activities and assessments that Lighthouse Reader features.
The Lighthouse Reader program helps make reading intervention an easy task for parents and teachers to implement and it makes learning enjoyable for the student who is struggling with their early reading skills. Early intervention is the most effective when a variety of approaches are implemented and Lighthouse Reader has all of the right helping tools and activities for your struggling reader to get the early intervention that they need.
