Riverbank Unified School District

Riverbank High School

English Interventions Descriptions

English Intervention - 2 periods

A course designed to assist students that have trouble with reading and writing, and have a reading level of more than 2 years below their grade level. This is determined by tests administered at the end of the previous school year. Because this course replaces the core English class, it is taught for 2 periods.

Teachers use a curriculum called Language! This curriculum focuses on 6 areas: Phonemic awareness (sounds of words); Word recognition and Spelling; Vocabulary and Morphology (prefix, suffix, and roots); Grammar; Listening and Reading Comprehension; Speaking and Writing. Each lesson includes these content areas, introducing new concepts and circling back to previously learned materials with reviews, and assessments. Research has shown that Language! is effective with English learners, struggling readers, and special-needs students, to increase literacy for elementary to high school students.

ACADEMIC STRATEGIES – 1 period

A course designed to teach skills to students to help them become better readers and critical thinkers, as well as developing better testing skills. CST data is used for placement. Students that test in the Basic range are generally placed in Academic Strategies. In addition, students are placed in these classes if they test at 1.5 -2 grade levels below their actual grade level (with the Group Reading Assessment and Diagnostic Evaluation). Also, students that are CELDT 4s and 5s are placed in this class.

Note: The class is generally only given to 9th and 10th grade students, however, 11th and/or 12th grade Resource students have also been placed in this class, if that it best meets their needs.

There are many strategies that are taught throughout the year that focus on reading comprehension, such as:

  • Working cooperatively to problem solve (THINK, BUILD)
  • Previewing the text (Survey or TRIMS)
  • Finding the main idea and details and paraphrasing them (Paraphrasing)
  • Asking questionsand finding the answers about the text (Self-questioning)
  • Making inferences to answer test questions (Inference)
  • Common Core applicable strategies (annotating text, citing evidence, and close reading)

A typical period will begin with review activities, including verbal practice of the steps of each strategy. Most of the period is spent on strategy work modeled by the teacher, then partner, group, and individual work or a combination of these. Each strategy works through eight stages from pre-testing, to post-testing and lots of practice in between. The research behind the eight stages is that students will learn, remember, and use the strategies in all of their classes if they have progressed through all of the stages. The result of mastering all the strategies is a more engage reader that can be more successful comprehending text.