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Interventions for General Beginning Reading Students

Topic Area Focus

The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) review focuses on reading interventions for students in grades K-3 (or ages 5-8) that are intended to increase skills in alphabetics (phonemic awareness, phonological awareness, print awarness and phonics), reading fluency, comprehension (vocabulary and reading comprehension), or general reading achievement (see definitions below). Systematic reviews of evidence in this topic area address the following questions:

• Which interventions intended to provide basic literacy instruction improve reading skills among students in grades K-3 (or ages 5-8), including alphabetics, fluency, comprehension or general reading achievement?
• Are some interventions more effective than others for certain types of reading skills?
• Are some interventions more effective for certain types of students, particularly students who have historically lagged behind in reading achievement?

Individual intervention-level reports are released on a continuous basis, prior to the topic level reports. One topic-level report may be generated to focus on general beginning reading interventions or specific categories of interventions, such as comprehensive curriculum-based models or classroom pull-out models.

Key Definitions

Alphabetics Domain

Phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness (or phoneme awareness) refers to the understanding that the sounds of spoken language-phonemes-work together to make words, and phonemes can be substituted and rearranged to create different words. Phonemic awareness includes the ability to identify, think about, and work with the individual sounds in spoken words. Phonemic awareness helps children learn how to read and spell, by allowing them to combine or blend the separate sounds of a word to say the word (e.g., "/c/ /a/ /t/ - cat").

Phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is a more encompassing term than phoneme/phonemic awareness (PA). Phonological awareness is a term referring to various types of awareness, which includes PA and also awareness of larger spoken units such as syllables and rhyming words. Tasks of phonological awareness might require students to generate words that rhyme, to segment sentences into words, to segment polysyllabic words into syllables, or to delete syllables from words (e.g., what is cowboy without cow?). Tasks that require students to manipulate spoken units larger than phonemes are simpler for beginners than tasks requiring phoneme manipulation (Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, & Carter, 1974).

Letter Identification. Knowing the names of the letters of the alphabet supports reading acquisition. Letter-naming measures have been shown to be predictors of reading development especially when letter naming is taught in conjunction with other beginning reading skills.

Print awareness. Print awareness refers to knowledge or concepts about print such as (a) print carries a message; (b) there are conventions of print such as directionality (left to right, top to bottom),differences between letters and words, distinctions between upper and lower case, punctuation; and that (c) books have some common characteristics (e.g. author, title, front/back). It has been shown that print awareness supports reading acquisition (e.g., decoding).

Phonics. Phonics¹ refers to (a) the knowledge that there is a predictable relationship between phonemes (the sounds in spoken language) and graphemes (the letters used to represent the sounds in written language); (b) the ability to associate letters and letter combinations with sound and blending them into syllables and words; and (c) the understanding that this information can be used to read or decode words.

Reading Fluency Domain

Reading fluency. Fluency is the ability to read text accurately, automatically, and with expression, while still extracting meaning from it.

Comprehension Domain

Vocabulary development. This refers to the development of knowledge about the meanings, uses, and pronunciation of words. The development of receptive vocabulary (words understood) and expressive vocabulary (words used) is critical for reading comprehension.

Reading comprehension. Reading comprehension refers to the understanding of the meaning of a passage and the context in which the words occur. Reading comprehension is composed of two equally important components. Decoding, or the ability to translate text into speech, is only part of the process of reading comprehension. The other part is language comprehension, or the ability to understand spoken language. All struggling readers have difficulty with either language comprehension or decoding or both.

General Reading Achievement Domain

General reading achievement. Outcomes that fall in the general reading achievement domain are those that either combine two or more of the previous domains (alphabetics, reading fluency, and comprehension) or provide some other type of summary score, such as a "total reading score" on a standardized reading tests, grades in reading or language arts class, or promotion to the next grade.

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