Reading Comprehension Interventions: Strategies That Work

When it comes to literacy, reading comprehension ties everything together. Looking at Scarborough’s Reading Rope, skilled readers must develop two interdependent skill strands: word recognition (including phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition) and language comprehension (which includes background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge). These strands weave together over time, and skilled reading comprehension emerges when both are sufficiently developed.

Scarborough’s “Rope” Model from Handbook of Early Literacy Research, © 2001 by Guilford Press.

When comprehension breaks down, it is rarely because students aren’t paying attention or aren’t trying. More often, it reflects a gap in word recognition, language comprehension, or both—meaning comprehension failure is a signal, not the problem itself. Effective reading comprehension intervention starts by identifying which strand of the Reading Rope is underdeveloped and delivering targeted, explicit instruction to address this.

There are several evidence-based reading comprehension intervention strategies that research consistently supports, and these can be implemented in whole-class, small-group, and individualized settings regardless of a student’s current skill level. By teaching these strategies explicitly and systematically, educators guide students from learning to read toward reading to learn.

Key Takeaways

• Because reading comprehension can break down for different reasons, effective intervention starts by identifying which strand of the Reading Rope (word recognition or language comprehension) needs support.

• Explicit, systematic instruction is significantly more effective for comprehension development than embedding strategies incidentally in text reading.

• The five evidence-based strategies below are supported by the National Reading Panel and align with a Structured Literacy approach.

• Each strategy can be applied across Tier I, Tier II, and Tier III settings with increasing intensity and decreasing group size.

• Lexia® Core5® Reading and Lexia® PowerUp Literacy® deliver these strategies within an explicit, systematic, cumulative, and diagnostic instructional framework.

Why Reading Comprehension Breaks Down

Understanding why comprehension fails is the first step toward choosing the right intervention. The Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) describes reading comprehension as the product of two distinct skills: decoding and linguistic comprehension. A deficit in either area produces comprehension failure, but the intervention looks quite different depending on which skill is falling short.

Students who decode accurately but struggle to make meaning often have gaps in vocabulary, background knowledge, or reasoning skills. These students understand spoken language at their grade level but cannot build the same understanding from text, often because the vocabulary or background assumptions in the text exceed what they already know.

Students with strong language comprehension but weak decoding face a different barrier: Word recognition failures prevent them from reading fluently enough to focus on meaning. What looks like a comprehension problem may actually be a decoding problem. Determining which profile applies is the foundation of an evidence-based reading comprehension intervention plan.

How Do You Teach Reading Comprehension?

As with teaching any aspect of literacy, explicit and systematic instruction is incredibly important. This is especially true when it comes to teaching reading comprehension. As an article from the International Dyslexia Association® explains, explicit instruction is characterized by teachers presenting new concepts with clear and direct statements, while also explaining the purpose behind the skill being taught. As such, teachers should follow explicit explanations by guiding students through activities and exercises. This is an integral part of the Structured Literacy approach and will help students further solidify new information.

Some important elements of explicit instruction include:

Sequencing skills logically and breaking them down

When teaching new skills to students, consider teaching easier concepts before more difficult ones, separating similar ideas to avoid confusion, and prioritizing high-frequency skills before covering less common ones. Along with properly sequencing lessons, make sure you’re breaking down new concepts into manageable steps. By segmenting complex ideas into smaller instructional units, students will have an easier time avoiding cognitive overload, strenuous processing demands, and strain on working memory capacity.

Focusing on explicit lessons and demonstrations

Lessons about new concepts should be explained with clear and concise wording while also maintaining a brisk pace that is quick enough to avoid boredom, yet slow enough to allow students to process new information. In these lessons, provide step-by-step demonstrations as well as plenty of examples and non-examples. Showing students when and when not to use these new skills will help them develop a deeper understanding of the topic at hand, while also illustrating the appropriate situations for implementing these skills.

Offering practice and application

Throughout your lessons, make sure students stay engaged with the material by requiring frequent responses. This allows you to check for understanding while simultaneously solidifying the information for students. Along with this, provide guided and supportive practice throughout the lesson, increasing difficulty and decreasing guidance as students develop their understanding. Make sure to provide immediate affirmative and corrective feedback throughout instruction, because this will reduce the likelihood of practicing errors and increase the likelihood for success.

Evidence-Based Reading Comprehension Intervention Strategies

Although there are a multitude of teaching strategies that can be implemented to help students develop their reading comprehension skills, there are only a few methods that lay the foundation for these skills. The following strategies have been studied and backed by research, lending themselves particularly well to in-class teaching methods.

These strategies are most effective when taught explicitly—not incidentally encountered during independent reading—and when students have regular opportunities to practice them across a variety of text types. 

Self-Monitoring Comprehension Strategies

When students are first learning to read, it is often difficult for them to self-monitor their understanding of individual texts. By helping students learn to self-monitor earlier in the literacy process, they will not only develop a deeper understanding of the text but also feel empowered to take responsibility for their own learning.

Self-monitoring is a metacognitive skill; it requires students to think about their own thinking as they read. Research identifies it as one of the most transferable comprehension strategies, as students who can accurately gauge when they don’t understand something are better positioned to apply a repair strategy than students who read through confusion without noticing their lack of understanding.

With this in mind, provide students with the tools necessary to self-monitor as they read new material. This includes using strategies such as rereading, reflecting on what they have learned, and using a dictionary to define unfamiliar words. You can also ask students to reflect on their personal experiences as they read, answer questions about how a text made them feel, or explain why they think a character did or said something.

Summarizing the Main Ideas

Having students provide a summary of the text in their own words requires them not only to identify the story's key points but also to put those main ideas into their own words. Moreover, summarizing allows students to make connections between ideas and begin developing their understanding of the way the text is organized. By having students summarize, teachers can assess how much was understood from the reading and determine where they can best support learners moving forward.

Teaching summarizing explicitly—rather than simply asking students to “write what the story was about”—means instructing students on how to identify the main idea versus supporting details, recognize organizational patterns in text (problem-solution, chronological, compare-contrast), and synthesize information across paragraphs. For evidence-based summarizing techniques educators can use in the classroom, see Lexia’s guide on summarizing strategies for reading comprehension.

Making Predictions

Asking students to make predictions throughout the reading process is a great way to exercise their comprehension skills. As students read, they can be prompted to make predictions about what will happen next or how the story will end. In addition to keeping them engaged, this motivates them to apply their background knowledge throughout the reading process.

Making predictions is particularly effective when paired with text previewing, as this combination teaches students to examine titles, headings, illustrations, and topic sentences before reading to activate background knowledge and generate purpose-setting questions.

Graphic Organizers

Graphic organizers are an especially helpful tool for teaching reading comprehension to students who are visual learners. These charts can be Venn diagrams, storyboards, mind maps, cause-and-effect charts, story maps, and so many more. Through these diagrams, students are able to see what the key concepts of the text are, as well as how each concept connects to one another.

Graphic organizers are especially valuable for students who struggle with text structure. Selecting the right organizer for the right text type teaches students not just about the specific text but about how that genre of writing is typically organized, which builds transferable schema for future reading.

Question-Answer Relationship Strategy (QAR)

The Question-Answer Relationship (QAR) strategy is a great way to get students involved with the text they are engaging in. Once students have completed a text, the QAR strategy gives them a structure that guides them in asking different types of questions.

There are four types of questions in the QAR strategy:

• Right there: These are questions with answers that can be found directly in the story. They typically start with who, what, when, where, why, or how.

• Think and search: One step past “right there,” these questions have answers that can be found within the text, but students must search to find them. Arriving at the answers may involve summarizing, comparing and contrasting, or finding specific examples of something in the text.

• Author and you: Going another step further, these types of questions ask students to relate the text to their own personal experiences. They might ask students to predict what happens next, determine the main idea, or question details within the text.

• On my own: These types of questions ask students to reflect on what they have read and directly relate the text to their personal knowledge and experiences. The teacher might ask questions starting with “Have you ever…?” or “How would you feel if…?”

The QAR strategy is particularly effective for building metacognitive awareness because it teaches students to evaluate where answers come from, a skill that transfers to standardized reading assessments and academic reading across content areas. For a deeper look at how questioning strategies build comprehension before, during, and after reading, see Lexia’s guide on questioning strategies for reading comprehension.

Choosing the Right Reading Comprehension Intervention

Selecting the most effective intervention strategy depends on understanding where in the comprehension process a student is struggling.

For students whose comprehension difficulties stem primarily from vocabulary gaps, strategies that build word knowledge before and during reading—including activating background knowledge and pre-teaching domain vocabulary—are the highest-leverage starting points.

For students who decode accurately but fail to monitor their own understanding, explicit self-monitoring instruction is often where intervention should begin. Because these students lack the metacognitive skills to recognize when meaning has broken down, they cannot apply repair strategies they may already know.

For students receiving comprehension intervention across Multi-Tiered System of Supports tiers, the same evidence-based strategy set applies across Tier I, Tier II, and Tier III, but with decreasing group size and increasing instructional intensity as students move through the tiers. For a broader overview of evidence-based literacy intervention across all five reading pillars, see Evidence-Based Reading Intervention Strategies. 

How Lexia Supports Reading Comprehension Intervention

The strategies above work best when delivered within an instructional framework that is explicit, systematic, cumulative, and diagnostic—the four principles of Structured Literacy that research associates with effective reading intervention consistently.

Lexia® Core5® Reading (pre-K–5) delivers comprehension instruction within exactly this framework. In Core5, comprehension activities are sequenced in direct relationship to each student’s phonological and word-recognition development, ensuring students are never asked to access text that exceeds what their foundational skills can support. The program’s diagnostic engine continuously adjusts instruction based on student performance, providing teachers with actionable data on where comprehension support should be targeted next.

Lexia® PowerUp Literacy® (grades 6–12) applies the same systematic, explicit approach to older students who have not yet reached reading proficiency. PowerUp targets the specific language comprehension strands (vocabulary, syntax, and background knowledge) most likely to limit older students’ ability to make meaning from complex texts. In independent research, PowerUp has been shown to be five times more effective than the average middle school reading intervention program.

Both programs are grounded in the science of reading and designed to integrate the comprehension strategies educators use in the classroom with a personalized, data-driven instructional sequence that adapts to each student. Explore how professional learning from Lexia can support your team’s ability to deliver evidence-based comprehension instruction.