Supporting struggling adolescent readers through the Response to Intervention (RTI) framework

Abstract

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to describe what needs to happen in Australian schools to provide effective literacy support for adolescent students with reading difficulties. The central thesis of this paper is that the Response to Intervention (RtI) model provides a useful framework for organizing multi-tiered evidence-based reading interventions for struggling adolescent readers. Necessary adaptations of the model for the secondary context are discussed and the benefits and pitfalls of flexible and fixed groupings are outlined. Australian schools cannot afford to adopt a “business-as-usual” approach. Reasonable adjustments within classrooms are not enough to equip students with the literacy they need. Rather, schools should look to how they can use the RtI model to provide varying levels of evidence-based reading intervention, drawing on the expertise of speech pathologists.