Evidence-Based Reading Intervention Strategies

With approximately 40% of students struggling to read at grade level, educators are under rising pressure to accelerate learning for all students. Increasingly, students are entering classrooms without basic reading skills, making them unprepared to tackle the requirements of their grade. Teachers tend to be similarly unprepared to address these learning gaps and rarely have the time required to do so. In response to these concerns, there is increasing pressure to make up for student learning gaps using accelerated learning strategies. 

Reading intervention strategies are key to helping students build their literacy skills and achieve reading proficiency. Below, we outline evidence-based techniques to help educators identify where a student may be struggling in the reading process and provide targeted activities that strengthen phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. 

What Is Reading Intervention?

Reading intervention is targeted, evidence-based instruction designed to help students strengthen specific reading skills, including phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Within an MTSS or RTI framework, these supports may include classroom instruction for Tier I, action plans and activities to be used in small-group instruction for Tier II, and highly individualized instruction for students working one on one with a teacher or professional for Tier III. Intervention strategies look different for each tier, with instruction becoming more individualized as students move from Tier I to Tier II.

At Lexia®, we offer reading  intervention programs that take a Structured Literacy approach. This approach to learning applies the science of reading, which means students are receiving evidence-based instruction that provides them with explicit, systematic, cumulative, diagnostic, and responsive instruction during their reading lessons.

Activities for Reading Intervention Instruction

There are multiple areas where your students might be struggling when it comes to literacy. A great way to support students at the Tier I and Tier II levels is to ensure classroom instruction covers all five of the core concepts of effective reading instruction. Here, we discuss all five pillars of literacy to help you determine where to begin with a student’s reading intervention program.

For older students who need reading intervention, Lexia® PowerUp Literacy® is proven to be up to 5x as effective as the average middle school reading intervention, helping students make multiple years of growth in a single academic year.

Building on Phonemic Awareness and Phonics

It has been shown that students who have a firm grasp of phonemic awareness and phonics are more likely to show early success in reading and spelling. While this is true, when taking a Structured Literacy approach, it is beneficial to build upon these two skills while also developing more complex ones like fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. 

Phonemic awareness is the practice of being able to identify phonemes—specifically in spoken words—that correspond to letters or groups of letters. Some activities you can do to help students develop their phonemic awareness are:

• Have students practice verbal rhyming or alliteration activities.

• Ask students to identify phonemes either in isolation or at the beginning, middle, or end of words.

• Practice blending, segmenting, deleting, and substituting phonemes from/in words.

Phonics connects directly with phonemic awareness—it is the ability to connect the sounds one hears with letters and words. The best methods of teaching students phonics are:

• Decoding: Students learn to read by recognizing and stringing together sounds. Instruct them on different word patterns and letter-sound correspondences.

• High-frequency words: Give students lessons about different words that will appear when they’re reading—specifically, those that they either can’t decode like other words or that are more efficient to commit to memory (e.g., said, the, what, etc.).

• Syllabication: Following high-frequency words, teach students about the six different types of syllables. Ask them to practice breaking down longer words into syllables both verbally and in writing.

• Spelling: This is where students begin to transition from the second literacy pillar (phonics) into the third (fluency). Begin integrating lessons about spelling by teaching students common spelling rules and having them do spelling-based activities.

Developing Fluency Using a Structured Literacy Approach

Once students have developed their phonology skills, they can begin working toward fluency. Fluency is the ability to read automatically with expression while also understanding what you read, and research has shown that it is best achieved by taking a Structured Literacy approach.

Here are some research-backed literacy intervention activities to help students develop their fluency skills, regardless of whether they’re in Tier I, Tier II, or Tier III:

• Choral reading: Instruct students to read aloud together with the teacher guiding them. This helps students develop their fluency skills in a more relaxed, community-based environment.

• Teacher read-aloud: The teacher models fluent oral reading for the students, emphasizing expressive reading and pauses. This can be combined with choral reading by pausing on certain words and having students collectively fill in the blank.

• Practice with prosody: Prosody is the intonation, stress, rhythm, and volume that comes with reading aloud. This can be developed through activities like reader’s theater, nursery rhymes, and poems.

To guide students with a Structured Literacy approach, teachers should give students mini-lessons before beginning the reading for that day. Work on introducing new concepts gradually and having lessons build on top of each other. Having students do activities in pairs or small groups can also help reinforce fluency in a fun, social way.

Building a Strong Vocabulary

A key part of the transition from learning to read into reading to learn is the ability to decode and understand different words. Vocabulary skills allow us to learn more about, well, everything. There are a wide variety of ways for teachers to incorporate vocabulary instruction into their curriculum, whether through explicit vocabulary lessons, practicing conversations, or incorporating vocabulary into other subjects. Here are a few of the best ways to support students struggling with vocabulary:

• Sort and identify: Take photos of objects (e.g., food, animals, etc.), ask students to identify the objects, and sort them into their respective categories.

• Connections with other subjects: Help students deepen their knowledge of other subjects by incorporating vocabulary lessons to go along with them.

• Morphological awareness: Teach students different morphological elements (prefix, suffix, root, etc.) and show how words can be broken down to understand their meaning or combined with other elements to create new words.

Practicing Reading Comprehension Skills

Reading comprehension is considered the final pillar of literacy. Ultimately, comprehension means students are able to go beyond just understanding what they read  to apply that understanding to other ideas and concepts. Here are some of the best literacy intervention methods to help students develop their reading comprehension skills:

• Relate to self: Throughout the process of reading a text, ask students to relate the text back to themselves. This could take the form of anything from asking their opinion on a story to making predictions about what will happen next.

• Summarizing: Ask students to explain in their own words what a text was about or pair up with a partner and answer discussion questions pertaining to the reading.

• Introduce different texts: Provide students with fictional stories, poems, and nonfiction texts to engage them in a wide breadth of knowledge.

Implementing Structured Reading Intervention Strategies

Here at Lexia, our resources for literacy are backed by the science of reading, which is a collective body of research that explains how we learn to read. Ultimately, research has shown that taking a Structured Literacy approach to reading instruction will help 95% of students learn how to read—a significant increase to the 30% of students able to learn how to read without it.

To take a Structured Literacy approach to reading intervention, teachers must ensure their lessons are explicit, systematic, cumulative, diagnostic, and responsive. Each topic should be taught to students directly, and lessons should build on top of each other in a stair-step fashion. Throughout the process of presenting new information to students, teachers should be aware of each student's strengths and weaknesses and adjust the lessons accordingly. This might mean moving a student to a different reading intervention tier or going over a concept multiple times. 

Supporting Reading Intervention Across Grade Levels With Lexia

We recognize teaching every single student how to read can be difficult—especially when each student has a unique skillset and background surrounding literacy. But we’re here to make sure literacy becomes a reality for every student, regardless of their academic challenges.

Lexia® Core5® Reading and Lexia PowerUp Literacy help educators deliver reading intervention through four core instructional principles:

Core5 supports foundational reading skill development for elementary students, while PowerUp helps older students strengthen word study, grammar, and comprehension through responsive intervention. 

Explore how Lexia can support your school’s MTSS or RTI programs with effective reading intervention across grade levels.