Effects of a vocabulary-added instructional intervention for at-risk English learners: Is efficient reading instruction more effective

The primary aim of this study was to measure effects of two different vocabulary-added reading interventions compared to a phonological awareness and decoding intervention. The second aim was to investigate the relationship between risk and responsiveness in this sample. Seventy-one primarily Spanish-speaking first grade English learners in a Title I school participated in the intervention (52% females). On average, students received 394 minutes of supplementary instruction from trained undergraduate and graduate interventionists, all using the same teaching behaviors (Core Intervention Model). For the treatment-control group (n = 18), 100% of instructional minutes were spent on phonological awareness and decoding (PAD), while for the two treatment groups, 30% of instructional minutes were spent on PAD and the remaining 70% on vocabulary instruction.;Both treatment groups listened to expository texts read aloud each week, and were taught target vocabulary words from the text. The treatment groups differed in that one emphasized semantic relations (SR), while the other emphasized morphological awareness (MA). All three groups made significant gains on a measure of nonsense word fluency (NWF), and only the treatment conditions made significant gains on a measure of target vocabulary word knowledge. Effect sizes were largest for the SR group on measures of NWF, oral reading fluency, word identification, and reading comprehension, and favored MA on measures of target vocabulary word knowledge and listening comprehension. The relationship between initial risk status and responsiveness to intervention was stronger for students in the PAD group than for students in either of the vocabulary-added groups.;Results demonstrate that for young, at-risk English learners increased instructional time spent on vocabulary is not only effective in teaching target vocabulary, but also more efficient in that students in the vocabulary treatments gained in phonological skills comparably to their peers who received 100% PAD instruction. These findings are important because there are large disparities in vocabulary size between English learners and native speakers, and these disparities increase throughout the school years. By intervening early and introducing expository vocabulary instruction while maintaining critical word-level decoding instruction, this study illustrates a more efficient model of early reading instruction for this population of at-risk students.