Intervention for Struggling ELL Readers

1: Foundational Skills (sometimes referred as “decoding” skills), include:

• Alphabetic Knowledge: Accurate and Automatic Recognition of letters
• Phonological Processing: Connecting letters and letter combinations to the correct sounds
• Phonemic Awareness: Listeners are able to hear, identify and manipulate phonemes, the smallest units of sound that can differentiate meaning. Separating the spoken word "cat" into three distinct phonemes, /k/, /æ/, and /t/, requires phonemic awareness.
• Phonological Awareness: Includes phonemic awareness but it also includes the ability to hear and manipulate larger units of sound, such as onsets and rimes and syllables.
• Recognition and Use of Morphemes and Bound Morphemes: A  morpheme is the smallest grammatical or meaningful unit in a language. Morphemes are categorized as roots and affixes (prefix and suffix).

2. Read Aloud and Shared Interactive Reading, include:

Vocabulary: Children acquire a rich and varied vocabulary through study of words in the context of the world. The major source of vocabulary learning is listening and speaking. Tiering vocabulary words works to scaffod them to more proficient use, building that essential vocabulary needed for years to come.

Tier One words are the words of every day speech usually learned in the early grades, albeit not at the same rate by all children. They primarily pose a challenge to ELL children.

Tier Two words (what the Standards refer to as general academic words) are far more likely to appear in written texts than in speech.  They appear in both literary and informational text and require deliberate and repeated instruction.  These words are the source of much of the difficulty lower-income children find with the complex texts used after grade 3.

Tier Three words (what the Standards refer to as domain-specific words) are specific to a domain or field of study. They are usually defined as “technical terms” in a glossary or within the text itself.

Comprehension: Without a rich working vocabulary in the content areas, taught in the context in which they are used, children will be less likely to understand the concepts presented in the complex texts of the upper elementary grades.

3. Guided Reading with Accountable Independent Reading:

In order to develop the reading fluency that comes with practice, the children must read a volume of reading with ongoing support (Guided Reading).  Students need the opportunity to read a volume of texts that engage them, at times based on individual choice, at times based on direction by the teacher. An example of the latter would be to guide reading selections to enhance connections to topics and themes being addressed in the curriculum. Both of these selection criteria have the added benefit of allowing students to read harder text on their own than they might otherwise due either to motivation or the ability to build on an earlier knowledge base. At times these reading choices may come from texts suggested by the teacher for any number of specific purposes.