Language Comprehension Interventions

One way to simultaneously support struggling readers' word recognition and comprehension skills is through a leveled text set. If your student has difficulty reading and understanding grade-level content, you can use this strategy. As you read, consider which of these interventions best aligns with your student's strengths and needs in the whole-learner domains.

A text set is a collection of resources that span genre and difficulty level and are organized around a certain topic or theme. Using text sets provides struggling readers with opportunities to read lower-level texts to gain background knowledge about a topic. As students become familiar with the content, they are able to read more difficult material on the same topic. Text sets can be small (choosing an informational and narrative text on the same topic for a two-day study) or large (choosing 10 texts to explore over three weeks). The breadth and depth of your text set should align with how large or small your learning objectives are.  

Although there are many ways to utilize a text set in the classroom, a basic structure for planning lessons is the following:

1. Identify your topic or unit of study. What content do you want students to learn?
2. Develop the text set.
   • First, choose your Anchor Text. An anchor text is your main text, which is typically written at the student's grade level
   • Then, develop your text set. Choose texts that are high-quality and engaging. Depending on the size of your grade, your text set could range from 3 texts (easy, medium, hard) to 10 or more texts. In your text set, you should include:
     • Various levels. Choose texts that range from below your students' reading levels to their grade levels
     • Various genres. Incorporate stories, articles, advertisements, poetry, children's books, etc.
     • Various media. Pictures, images, video clips, books, magazines, and interviews
   • Finally, once you've chosen your materials, create leveled "text buckets." Each bucket should include materials that fall within a certain grade level
3. Anticipatory Set. Choose an activity to engage students, and begin to activate their prior knowledge around the topic. Examples include showing students a picture and asking what they see, using a KWL chart, reading a children's book aloud, or showing an artifact and getting them to make predictions about the content
4. Read. Give students an activity to complete using the leveled buckets. This activity should align with your objectives, and students should be able to use any text to complete the activity. As students get familiar with the content, give them harder books to read about the same content
5. Assess. At the end of the text set project, decide how you will determine whether students have mastered your objectives. This may include project-based learning such as designing a website, writing a readers' theater script, or any activity that demonstrates mastery of the objectives.

Read the example Text Set Lesson Plan below. As you read, consider how it incorporates the lesson planning components listed above.  

Text Set Lesson Plan PDF

Wilson, A. (2016). Text set lesson plan. Copyright at Relay GSE. New York, NY:  Relay Graduate School of Education.

Click this link to download a Lesson Planning Template to use for creating text sets

Wilson, A. (2016). Text set lesson planning template. Copyright at Relay GSE. New York, NY:  Relay Graduate School of Education.

Additional Web-based Resources for Creating Text Sets:
Louisiana Believes Creating a Text Set Overview
Louisiana Believes Frog Text Set Grade One
Text Set Resources from Newsela
Readworks.org Comprehension Lessons