Hi Jasmine,
I can sense the urgency in your question. Teachers working with adolescents struggling to read know there is not a moment to waste. I wish I could tell you which skill to target because that would make your life a lot easier. In reality, it’s a little like someone who wants to live a healthier lifestyle asking whether they should focus on what they eat and build a more nutritious diet, or focus on how they live and improve their exercise and sleep. It’s unfortunately not a binary. The other factor that will influence my answer is that it depends on the needs of your students because an intervention should be targeted. If a student reads words inaccurately or laboriously, intervention should explicitly address that particular source of difficulty. However, this instruction should occur alongside meaningful work with vocabulary, language, and text comprehension using content and texts suited for adolescents. You might find the guidance in AIM’s adolescent readers White Paper helpful to guide this work. If a student reads words accurately and efficiently but still struggles to understand text, intervention time should include a heavy focus on vocabulary, syntax, and comprehension-building practices. Whatever the instructional emphasis, materials and tasks should respect students’ age and connect to meaningful academic content, which is particularly important for adolescents who may have experienced years of frustration with reading.
I don’t know the needs of the students you are working with, but one of the challenges with reading difficulties in middle school is that the source of the difficulty isn’t always straightforward. Students who continue to struggle with word reading often have needs related to language and comprehension too. Students who can read words accurately may not be reading them efficiently, and even when they do, they may still struggle to understand what they read. Making this even more complicated is the fact that strong decoding skills don’t predict strong comprehension for older students in the same way that it does for younger students. In other words, being able to read the words on the page remains essential, but reading the words simply isn’t enough to guarantee understanding. As students encounter increasingly complex text, language comprehension carries more of the load. You also might be interested in AIM’s Deep Dive about the practices that shift in secondary classrooms.
That variation in students’ needs is also why evidence-based guidance for older struggling readers addresses multiple components of reading rather than prescribing a single instructional focus. A multi-component intervention, meaning instruction integrates numerous/multiple reading skills, is most effective because it explicitly integrates the skills necessary for reading, rather than targeting a single skill in isolation. Importantly, multi-component does not mean every component receives equal attention or that every component is present in every lesson. As I said before, the emphasis should vary according to students’ needs.
For example, a lesson might start by having students decode and examine the syllables and/or meaningful parts of a collection of words essential for understanding a text they’re about to read. Certainly, text reading will be an essential part of the intervention. As students read, teachers can draw their attention to cohesive ties (the connections writers create between different parts of a text). These include pronouns that refer to people, things, or ideas mentioned earlier. For example, in “The region experienced a severe drought. It lasted for months,” it refers to the drought. Teachers might ask, “What lasted for months? How do you know?” to help students connect the information across sentences. Teachers can also highlight connectives (words and phrases that signal how ideas relate to one another). For example, the next sentence might read, “As a result, farmers lost much of their harvest.” Asking, “What does as a result tell us about the connection between the drought and the lost harvest?” helps students understand the cause-and-effect relationship. After an initial reading, the teacher might select a complex sentence from the text to reread and examine more closely. Targeted questions could help students identify who or what the sentence is about, what is happening, and how its words and phrases work together to convey meaning. In this way, the lesson coordinates instruction in decoding, vocabulary, syntax, fluency, and comprehension. For additional guidance, I’d point you to the What Works Clearinghouse Providing Reading Interventions for Students in Grades 4–9 landing page. In addition to the practical recommendations in the Educator’s Practice Guide, you will also find several related resources I think you may find helpful.
I know you asked what you should do in intervention specifically, but the unfortunate reality is that intervention programs alone will likely be insufficient in remediating reading problems for older students with longstanding difficulties. A school-wide systemic approach is usually necessary to help readers who are behind make accelerated progress. How can science, social studies, mathematics, and English language arts teachers, for example, systematically build the knowledge, academic vocabulary, morphological awareness, and understanding of complex sentences students need to learn from disciplinary text? Can all teachers commit to using the same routine to “get the gist” so that every time a student reads, they get practice with the essential skill of synthesizing information? Could everyone prompt students with the same word-reading routine when reading a challenging word? That kind of shared approach gives students many more opportunities to strengthen the skills they need than a single intervention period can provide alone.
May your students benefit from the thoughtfulness you’re bringing to this work!
