Supporting Struggling Readers in Later Primary Years: Current Practice in Schools and a Multicomponent Reading Comprehension Intervention for Year 3 Children

In the UK, many children leave primary school without achieving grade-level reading competence. While early interventions are prevalent, support diminishes as children progress through primary school, where reading undergoes a pivotal transition from ‘learning to read’ to ‘reading to learn’, posing challenges for struggling readers. This thesis aims to address gaps in the literature by (1) investigating how children with reading difficulties in later primary school are identified and supported in the UK while also exploring educational practitioners’ views on the ‘optimal’ reading intervention and (2) assessing the feasibility of a reading comprehension intervention.

A two-phase research design was adopted. The first phase employed questionnaires and follow-up interviews to answer the first question posed above. Results indicate that while the governmental educational policies, and as an extension, practice in schools, echoes research, more support is available for children with word reading difficulties than children with reading comprehension difficulties. Educational practitioners reported that an optimal intervention for children in later primary years would be scripted, one-to-one or in small groups depending on the targeted skill, frequent but in short sessions, multicomponent where one component was vocabulary, and in-person, where technology can play a supportive role.

Building on these findings, a second study investigated whether SuRe, an evidence-based, literacy-rich, multicomponent reading comprehension intervention, can feasibly be implemented in UK schools. SuRe was implemented in six schools for 12 weeks with 34 children in Year 3 (ages 7-8). While session length posed a feasibility concern, overall, results were promising in terms of acceptability, demand, implementation, practicality, and effectiveness. This suggests that a literacy-rich and multicomponent intervention focusing on foundational oral language skills (e.g., vocabulary and grammatical knowledge) and higher order cognitive functions (e.g., inference skills) can be feasibly implemented in mainstream schools, and lead to improvement in a number of reading outcomes.