Hi Riley,
The most important goal of a reading intervention, no matter who is providing the intervention, is to help students get good at reading, and your question directly and accurately highlights this emphasis. To do that, of course, we need students to spend time reading. But what should they read? That answer is very dependent on the age of the student, the goal of the intervention, and, as you mention, how often and for how long you’re meeting with them.
Generally speaking, with early elementary school students, I use decodable books and passages in intervention. It’s typical for these students to struggle because of deficits in their word-reading skills, and the controlled aspect of this type of text allows me to get students reading connected text (rather than just practicing letter sounds or reading individual words) relatively quickly because I only need them to know a few letter sounds and high-frequency words. If students have learned the letter sounds for <a>, <s>, <m>, and <n>, they can practice reading sentences like:
See Sam? I see Sam. Sam is a man. Sam sat. See Nan? Sam sees Nan. Nan sat.
However, because decodable texts use controlled language, they can sometimes sound unnatural (like in my example above). The controlled structure may also make certain spelling patterns seem more common than they are, and some words, such as Nan, are unlikely to appear often in everyday reading. For more information, see our Decodable Texts Deep Dive. All that to say, as students get older and gain more decoding skills, I move away from using decodable texts in intervention. What do I use instead? Fiction or nonfiction? Excerpt or book? A challenging text or a text at the student’s level? The illusion of this being a dichotomous choice is part of the problem.
The answer to all is usually…yes. That answer may feel unsatisfactory, but the reality is we don’t currently have research showing one type of text is better than another for all students in all situations. In fact, exposing students to a wide range of texts helps ensure they encounter a variety of sentence and text structures across a range of writing styles and complexities.
Let’s reason through a choice that’s being asked a lot right now. Should you use a whole book or an excerpt? I hope I’ve already established that there is no reason why you can’t do both and there is no evidence that one type of text is superior at building reading skills when compared to the other. Yet there are substantiated theoretical reasons for each. I’m apt to choose a whole book with students in intervention that I see frequently because sections/chapters will span multiple reading sessions and I want students to read widely (as opposed to spending the whole semester with one book). Sometimes I read a book with an intervention group in the hopes I can interest them enough that they will read another similar book (or a book by the same author or that is part of the series) on their own outside of class. I also read books with students when I want to specifically target the demand of reading a text for a sustained period.
Other times, I pick an excerpt. The texts students read shape the knowledge they are likely to gain. So when students are studying a complex topic in the classroom, I might consider using several connected texts about that topic, allowing me to simultaneously target reading skills in intervention while also introducing the students to the important vocabulary and concepts they will likely need to understand the material in class. For example, in Civics, students could be studying immigration and US citizenship. In this situation, I may have students read a biography about an immigrant, an informational article on Ellis Island, and the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution to help students deepen their knowledge on the topic they’re studying in class. I also might choose an excerpt when my group of students needs support with fluency, and I plan to support accuracy, automaticity, phrasing, and expression through some repeated reading.
The takeaway is that a strong intervention is likely to combine text types rather than choose one exclusively. Another way to frame it is to begin with what students need to learn or practice, and then select a text that provides that opportunity.
Whatever you choose, keep your students reading!