Approaches to early reading interventions: immediate and delayed response to universal and targeted interventions in early primary school

In this talk, Prof Rob Savage describes recent work exploring the effects of early intervention inspired by Response-to-Intervention (RtI) models, and using large-scale field-experiment designs, to an audience of practitioners and researchers. Interventions aimed at making the opaque nature of English more manifest to young readers. He discussed several studies and approaches used. Study 1 explored whether best-practice ‘tier 2’ phonic work could be optimized using a novel dynamic phonic approach for ‘at-risk’ grade 1 (year 1) children. Significant effects of reading interventions were found on several literacy measures and were evident at delayed post-tests. These patterns transferred across from English to French in children educated in a dual language context. Study 2 assessed other theory-driven approaches to support word reading skills of ‘at-risk’ grade 2 (year 2) children. Professor Savage discusses results with regards to best practice for literacy intervention at Key Stage 1.