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2006 39: 390J Learn DisabilSylvia Linan-Thompson, Sharon Vaughn, Kathryn Prater and Paul T. Cirino

The Response to Intervention of English Language Learners at Risk for Reading Problems  

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JOURNAL OF LEARNING DISABILITIESVOLUME 39, NUMBER 5, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2006, PAGES 390–398

The Response to Intervention ofEnglish Language Learners at Riskfor Reading Problems

Sylvia Linan-Thompson, Sharon Vaughn, Kathryn Prater, and Paul T. Cirino

Abstract

The response to intervention (RTI) of English language learners identified as at risk for reading difficulties in the fall of first grade wasexamined at the end of first grade and at the end of second grade. Students at risk for reading problems were randomly assigned to in-tervention or control groups. Intervention students received supplemental reading intervention daily for 50 minutes in small groups fromOctober to April. Students in the comparison condition received the school’s existing instructional program for struggling readers. Cri-teria were established to determine adequate RTI at the end of first grade and at the end of second grade. The results indicated that morestudents who participated in the first-grade intervention in either Spanish or English met the established RTI standards than studentswho did not, and this finding was maintained through the end of second grade.

The term response to intervention(RTI) has become an importantpart of the education lexicon.

RTI is the degree to which a studentwho has been identified as at risk foracademic or behavioral problems andhas been provided with interventionhas benefited from the interventionand eliminated or considerably re-duced his or her risk status. Studentswho make expected gains are said torespond to instruction, and they are ex-pected to continue to make progresswhen adequate instruction is providedin the general education classroom.Students who make minimal gains ordo not meet benchmarks even after re-ceiving high-quality, validated inter-ventions are described as not ade-quately responding to intervention.These students may need more inten-sive, long-term interventions and, pos-sibly, special education services. Deter-mining the response to interventionrequires assessing students to deter-mine risk, providing intervention, andmonitoring student progress with on-going data to ascertain response. RTIhas been associated with tiered models

of instruction and the identification ofstudents with learning disabilities(LD). Typically, within a tiered model,the first tier is the core reading pro-gram, and the second tier is an in-tervention for students who are notmaking adequate progress in the corereading program. When the second tierof intervention does not adequatelymeet the students’ needs, they areconsidered—based on their responseto intervention—as being candidatesfor referral to special education. In sometiered approaches, students are pro-vided with a third tier of even more in-tensive intervention prior to referralfor special education. There is a grow-ing body of research on the use of RTIboth as an alternative to the long-standing IQ–achievement discrepancymodel for identifying students withLD (Speece & Case, 2001; Vaughn,Linan-Thompson, & Hickman-Davis,2003) and for the provision of tieredinstruction (Dickson & Bursuck, 1999,O’Connor, 2000; Vaughn & Linan-Thompson, 2003). In fact, in the currentreauthorization of the Individuals withDisabilities Education Act (IDEA; 2004),

states have the option to discontinuethe use of IQ–achievement discrepancy,eliminating the requirement for IQtests as part of the LD identificationprocess and allowing states to use re-sponse to intervention (RTI) criteria aspart of the LD identification process.However, there are still many issuesand concerns to consider regarding theimplementation of RTI with all stu-dents (Vaughn & Fuchs, 2003), andwith culturally and linguistically di-verse students in particular, becausethe research on interventions and theirefficacy with these students is limited.Thus, the appropriate application ofRTI for identifying students from cul-turally and linguistically diverse back-grounds as struggling readers is notyet clearly evident.

The current study examines oneaspect of RTI for English languagelearners (ELLs): the incidence of stu-dents who do not respond to in-struction (nonresponders) even after aresearch-based, intensive, long-termintervention has been provided. Thispopulation is of particular interest be-cause students who do not respond to

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instruction are the most likely to re-quire special education services. Giventhat students from non–English-speaking backgrounds have often beenmislabeled for special education ser-vices due to issues such as the lan-guage of the tests used to identify theIQ–achievement discrepancy (Jimenez,Siegel, & Lopez, 2003), language abili-ties (Gunderson & Siegel, 2001), and cul-tural differences (Ortiz & Maldonado-Colon, 1986; Salend, Duhaney, &Montgomery, 2002), finding viableways to appropriately identify andplace ELLs who may need special edu-cation services is of critical importance.In the following sections, we beginwith a description of the use of RTI intiered instruction, and then we lookmore closely at issues related to RTIand the identification of students withLD.

RTI and Tiered Instruction

Tiered instruction provides a system-atic procedure, based on progressmonitoring data, for providing supple-mental intervention to students that re-quire various levels of support to ben-efit from classroom instruction. Theimplementation of tiered instructionrequires a cyclical approach to instruc-tion, in which assessment and instruc-tion are aligned to ensure that studentsare assessed periodically and providedwith intervention if they performbelow a benchmark (an accepted min-imum level of performance). As earlyas kindergarten, students who are likelyto have reading difficulties are identi-fied and provided with interventionsthat include the critical elements of be-ginning reading (phonemic awareness,phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and com-prehension). Early identification is acritical component of tiered instruc-tion, because students who have poorreading skills at the end of first graderarely acquire average-level readingskills by the time they finish elemen-tary school (Francis, Shaywitz, Steub-ing, Shaywitz, & Fletcher, 1996; Juel,1988).

Another critical component oftiered intervention is the use of vali-dated interventions. Research has iden-tified well-recognized elements of in-struction associated with improvedreading outcomes for monolingual English students. Moreover, severalsyntheses have linked systematic andexplicit instruction in phonemic aware-ness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, andcomprehension to improved outcomesfor struggling readers (National Read-ing Panel, 2000; National ResearchCouncil, 2000). Conversely, researchthat has examined minority students’response to these research-based prac-tices has been less well established.Often, culturally and linguistically di-verse students are represented in theresearch on effective practices forteaching students with reading diffi-culties; however, the findings for thesestudents are rarely disaggregated fromthe findings for majority students(Donovan & Cross, 2002; Swanson,Hoskyn, & Lee, 1999), limiting theirusefulness in determining the benefitof the intervention for this population.

Interventions With ELLs at Risk for Reading

Problems

Although the research base for inter-vention with ELLs is not as extensiveas with monolingual English students,there are studies that have examinedthe efficacy of reading interventionswith ELLs with reading difficulties(Denton, Anthony, Parker, & Has-brouck, 2004; Escamilla, Loera, Ruiz, &Rodriguez, 1998; Gunn, Biglan, Smol-kowski, & Ary, 2000; Vaughn, Linan-Thompson, et al., in press; Vaughn,Mathes, et al., in press). In one study,first-grade ELLs who were providedwith Descubriendo la Lectura, a supple-mental reading program based onReading Recovery, performed on parwith their classmates if they completedthe first-grade intervention program(Escamilla et al., 1998). In this program,students who have successfully com-

pleted the program are “discontin-ued.” However, in a report by Nealand Kelly (1999), one fourth of ELLswho participated in Reading Recovery inEnglish or Spanish showed insufficientprogress while receiving interventionand were “not discontinued.” Thisgroup of students, who had the lowestskills prior to intervention, was deemedunsuccessful in meeting program crite-ria for the adequate acquisition of read-ing skills and, therefore, did not receivethe complete intervention. These find-ings suggest that Reading Recovery andDescubriendo la Lectura may not be ap-propriate interventions for those stu-dents who are most at risk for readingdifficulties because the students withthe greatest need are not eligible to re-ceive the full term of the intervention.

The few studies providing inter-ventions to ELLs that have includedsystematic and explicit instruction indecoding, fluency, and comprehensionhave had mixed effects when ELLswere compared to control groups. Den-ton et al. (2004) examined the effects of two short reading interventions (22sessions each) on the English readingoutcomes of ELLs in second- to fifth-grade bilingual programs. Studentswere assigned to one of two groupsbased on the severity of their delay;students with significant reading prob-lems received a systematic decoding,fluency, and comprehension interven-tion, whereas better readers were pro-vided with a fluency program. Studentsin each group were then randomlyassigned to either an intervention pro-gram or a control condition. Statisti-cally significant differences betweenintervention and control conditionswere only found for the systematic de-coding, fluency, and comprehensionprogram and then only for the wordidentification outcome measure.

Gunn et al. (2000) investigated theeffect of two comprehensive readinginterventions on the reading outcomesof kindergarten through third-gradestudents. Students in the interventioncondition were provided with a read-ing program based on the principles ofdirect instruction in English for 25 to

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30 min daily for 5 months to 2 years.Students in first or second grade whowere beginning readers either receivedan intervention that focused on pho-nemic awareness, letter–sound corre-spondence, phonics, and practice read-ing of decodable text or were assignedto a control condition. Students in thirdand fourth grade received instructionin phonics and structural analysis, de-coding, comprehension, and fluency orwere assigned to a control condition.The results with this small sample (n =19) revealed significant differences be-tween the ELLs in the intervention andcontrol conditions only in oral readingfluency and marginal but not signifi-cant differences in favor of the inter-vention group on word attack, letter–word identification, vocabulary, andpassage comprehension.

Two intervention studies, whichmake up the data set for the currentstudy, have shown promising initial re-sults for providing comprehensivereading interventions to first-gradeELLs. One study was conducted inEnglish and the other in Spanish; theyexamined the effects of a reading inter-vention with first-grade students atrisk for reading problems (Vaughn,Linan-Thompson, et al., in press;Vaughn, Mathes, et al., in press). First-grade ELLs were screened for readingproblems, and those students whowere most at risk for reading difficul-ties were randomly assigned to a sup-plemental intervention or to typicalschool services. All students were pro-vided with their core reading programin either English or Spanish as decidedby the school, and the intensive, 50-min, five-times-a-week comprehensiveintervention was matched to their corereading program. All students were as-sessed in both English and Spanish.

The results indicated that stu-dents who participated in the Englishintervention outperformed control stu-dents on the English versions of rapidletter naming, letter–sound identifica-tion, phonological awareness compos-ite, and Woodcock Language ProficiencyBattery–Revised (WLBP-R) Verbal Anal-ogies, Word Attack, Dictation, and

Passage Comprehension subtests. Theresults for the Spanish intervention re-vealed that at posttest, there were sta-tistically significant differences in favorof the intervention group on the Span-ish version of letter–sound identifica-tion, phonological awareness compos-ite, WLPB-R Listening Comprehension,Word Attack, Passage Comprehension,and on two measures of oral readingfluency.

Comprehensive reading interven-tions seem to offer some advantage to ELLs in phonological awareness(Vaughn, Linan-Thompson, et al., inpress; Vaughn, Mathes, et al., in press),word attack (Vaughn, Linan-Thompson,et al., in press; Vaughn, Mathes, et al.,in press), word identification (Dentonet al., 2004), fluency (Gunn et al., 2000; Vaughn, Linan-Thompson, et al.,in press), and comprehension (Vaughn,Linan-Thompson, et al., in press;Vaughn, Mathes, et al., in press),whereas outcomes for students that re-ceived less comprehensive interven-tions were not statistically significantwhen compared to control students(Denton et al., 2004).

Although the comprehensive in-terventions were effective, previousresearch (Vaughn, Linan-Thompson, &Hickman-Davis, 2003) has revealedthat some students who participatesuccessfully in supplemental interven-tions do not continue to thrive in thegeneral education classroom. There-fore, more information about effectiveinterventions in reading for ELLs isneeded to determine the long-term ef-fects of systematic and explicit inter-ventions based on the core elements ofan effective reading intervention.

Distinguishing ReadingProblems and Reading

Disabilities

A second issue that is salient for ELLsand requires further examination inthe use of RTI is the lack of distinctionbetween students that have a readingdisability and those who have poorreading skills. Although there has been

increased emphasis on improvingreading instruction in recent years, al-most 20% of all students have consid-erable trouble learning to read (Good,Simmons, & Smith, 1998). Furthermore,many reading assessments are unableto identify the cause of the difficultyamong ELLs—only that there is one.Among students from culturally andlinguistically diverse backgrounds,limited English proficiency and lack ofeducational opportunity may be asso-ciated with difficulty in acquiringreading skills (Klingner & Artiles,2003) and poor performance on read-ing assessments.

Fuchs and Fuchs (1998) and Fuchs,Fuchs, and Speece (2002) describedand explored the use of RTI as a meansof identifying students with LD. RTI isbased on the premise that a significantfactor in accurately identifying stu-dents as requiring special educationshould be that those students do notrespond adequately to appropriate in-struction. Although large numbers ofstudents at risk for academic problemswould be identified initially, only thosestudents who did not respond to theintervention, or whose response wasminimal, would be identified as hav-ing a learning disability. A commonfinding from studies with monolingualEnglish students is that a small per-centage of the students (5%–7%) fail tomake adequate progress even when in-tensive interventions are provided(Dickson & Bursuck, 1999; O’Connor,2000; Torgesen et al., 2001; Vaughn,Linan-Thompson, & Hickman-Davis,2003; Vellutino et al., 1996). It is un-known whether similar percentageswould apply to ELLs.

In summary, RTI is a promisingalternative for the identification of stu-dents with LD, including students fromlinguistically diverse backgrounds, yetlittle research has examined RTI as ameans of identifying ELLs with reading-related LD (Speece, Case, & Molloy,2003; Vaughn & Linan-Thompson,2003). This study addresses the RTI ofELLs identified as at risk for readingproblems in the fall of first grade andprovided with extensive and system-

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atic intervention for seven months—matching intervention to the languageof their core reading instruction(Vaughn, Linan-Thompson, et al., inpress; Vaughn, Mathes, et al., in press).These students were examined at theend of first grade to determine theirRTI and again at the end of theirsecond-grade year to determine whichstudents were still at risk for readingfailure. For this study, the studentswere considered to be at risk if they didnot meet minimum criteria of less than1 SD below the mean in word attackand comprehension measures. Stu-dents who did meet these criteria wereconsidered to have responded ade-quately to the intervention provided.Thus, we were interested in determin-ing (a) the number of students whomet the established minimum criteriain first grade but were at risk again atthe end of second grade and (b) thenumber of students who were still atrisk at the end of first grade and con-tinued to be at risk at the end of secondgrade. We also compared students whoreceived the researcher-provided inter-vention to students who received theschool-provided interventions and de-termined the number of students ineach condition who continued to thrivein second grade.

Method

Participants

This study was part of an overall pro-gram project investigating biliteracyand bioracy in bilingual students(Spanish–English). The schools in whichthe Spanish and English interventionprograms were conducted representeda subsample of those participating in alarge multistate, multisite longitudinalproject focusing on language and liter-acy development in ELLs from kinder-garten through the end of secondgrade.

Eleven schools (4 for the Englishintervention and 7 for the Spanish in-tervention) in these areas were se-lected. All were considered effective

for bilingual students using the fol-lowing a priori selection criteria: (a) atleast 60% of the population was Latino,and (b) the schools’ state-level readingachievement test at third grade indi-cated that 80% or more of the studentspassed the state-level reading test.Moreover, the schools participating inthe Spanish intervention provided atransitional bilingual program, whereasthe schools in which the English inter-vention was provided had at least twoclassrooms that provided English in-struction to first-grade ELLs. Furtherinformation regarding these schoolsmay be found elsewhere (Vaughn,Linan-Thompson, et al., in press;Vaughn, Mathes, et al., in press).

All first-grade students in each ofthe 11 schools were screened at thebeginning of the school year. Thescreening consisted of two subtests (in both Spanish and English): (a) the Letter–Word Identification subtest fromthe Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery–Revised (WLPB-R), and (b) thefirst five words (consisting of two- tofour-letter words) from an experimen-tal word reading list used to assess ini-tial word reading ability. This word listwas developed by first generatingwords from K–3 instructional cumula-tive vocabulary materials. The gener-ated word list was then matched to adatabase of word frequencies in printin Spanish texts (Sebastián, Cuetos,Martí, & Carreiras [2000], which is sim-ilar to Zeno, Ivens, Millard, & Duv-vuri’s [1995] database of printed wordfrequencies in English), and 40 wordswere selected from the K–3 corpuswith varying probability (low proba-bility for K words; for non-K words,the probability of selection varied bylog frequency, i.e., higher for low-frequency words, lower for high-frequency words). The final list con-sisted of 40 words representing adiversity of linguistic features, orderedby difficulty to span kindergarten tothe end of second grade. This measurehas very high reliability at first- andsecond-grade levels (> .90).

Students who scored below the25th percentile for the first grade on the

Letter–Word Identification subtest andwho were unable to read more thanone of the simple words from the wordlist were selected for the intervention.For Spanish intervention students,these criteria applied only to Spanishmeasures. However, for students in theEnglish intervention, the criteria wereapplied to both Spanish and Englishmeasures. This decision was made be-cause poor performance on the Englishmeasures by young ELLs may be solelydue to their lack of exposure to Englishprint materials. Therefore, a sample oftheir performance on Spanish mea-sures was used to assist in making in-structional decisions.

In the schools that provided Spanish instruction, 361 students werescreened; 73 (20%) met criteria, and 69were randomized to intervention orcomparison groups; of these, 64 (31 in-tervention and 33 comparison partici-pants) completed the study. In theschools with English instruction, 216students were screened; 56 (26%) metcriteria, and 48 were randomized to in-tervention or comparison groups; ofthese, 39 (22 intervention and 17 com-parison participants) completed thestudy, and 3 additional students wereavailable at the end of Grade 2, thoughnot at the end of Grade 1. The primaryreason for the decrease in numbers be-tween all assessment points was thestudents’ family moving. All studentswere Hispanic, and female studentsconstituted approximately half (45%Spanish, 50% English) of their samples.Further details regarding the charac-teristics of these students may be foundelsewhere (Vaughn, Linan-Thompson,et al., in press; Vaughn, Mathes, et al.,in press).

These 103 students—64 in theSpanish study and 39 in the Englishstudy—composed the sample at thebeginning of first grade and repre-sented a group of students that was athigh risk for reading failure; that is, wefollowed a group of students who werelikely to fall below expectations on anyRTI criteria and who might fail to showimprovement over the course of theschool year. There were no substantive

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pretest differences between interven-tion and control students on any mea-sure in either study in either language,including the measures used to deter-mine response to intervention (WordAttack and Passage Comprehension).Pretest scores on these measures are re-ported in Table 1. Scores for students inthe Spanish study indicated that themajority was performing at the base-line on subtests assessing phonemicawareness, rapid letter naming, andword reading fluency skills in Spanish,and a similar but more pronouncedpattern was seen in these students’ En-glish skill performance. For students inthe English study, floor effects were ap-parent on the experimental word read-ing lists, Rapid Letter Naming, and Dy-namic Indicators of Basic Early LiteracySkills (DIBELS)–Beginning of Year inboth languages; furthermore, most stu-dents knew letter names in English,but scores were skewed toward thelow end for Spanish letter naming.

Students were assessed again atthe end of first grade and at the end ofsecond grade. The sample at the end of first grade consisted of 103 students(64 in the Spanish study and 39 in theEnglish study). At the end of secondgrade, 75 students were assessed (46students in the Spanish study and 29 inthe English study). Three students inthe English study had data for the end

of second grade but did not have datafor the end of first grade.

Measures

Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery–Revised (WLPB-R; Woodcock, 1991;Woodcock & Muñoz-Sandoval, 1995).The WLPB-R (English Form), is a well-known standardized instrumentwhose normative sample was concor-dant with 1980 U.S. Census statistics,consisted of 6,359 participants (3,245 inGrades K–12), and was the same asthat of the Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-educational Battery–Revised (Woodcock& Johnson, 1989). Median coefficientalphas for the subtests utilized rangedfrom .90 to .92 across all age ranges(and alphas ranged from .88 to .96 atages 6 and 9) Test–retest measures forselected subtests utilized in this studyin a sample of 504 ranged from .82 to.92. The WLPB-R Spanish Form wasderived from 3,911 native Spanishspeaking individuals from 22 countries(1,325 from the United States, and1,512 from Mexico) who were close tomonolingual Spanish speakers. Me-dian coefficient alphas for the subtestsutilized ranged from .84 to .92 acrossall age ranges (and alphas ranged from.68 to .95. Median coefficient alphas for the subtests utilized ranged from.87 to .89 across all age ranges (and al-

phas ranged from .89 to .92 at ages 6and 9; Woodcock & Muñoz-Sandoval,1995). The test development, scaling,and norming process for the assess-ment is described in detail in theWLPB-R manuals (Woodcock, 1991;Woodcock & Muñoz-Sandoval, 1995)along with content, concurrent, andconstruct validity data. Measures weredeveloped in Spanish to parallel mea-sures in English, and these measureswere calibrated to English items interms of difficulty by adapting itemswith known calibrations in Englishinto the Spanish test and then usingthese items to calibrate the remainingitems in each Spanish language sub-test. This scaling process allows scoreson the English and Spanish languageassessments to be directly compared,in the sense that it places the Spanishlanguage norms on the same scale asthe English language norms (Wood-cock, 1991; Woodcock & Muñoz-Sandoval, 1995). WLPB-R subtestsused for this study were Letter–WordIdentification (single word reading),Word Attack, and Passage Compre-hension.

Results

To determine students’ response to in-tervention (RTI), all participating stu-dents were categorized as respondersor nonresponders at the end of firstgrade, based on their standard scoreperformance on the WLPB-R Word At-tack and Passage Comprehension sub-tests. Students were identified as re-sponders if they scored above 85 onWLPB-R Word Attack and PassageComprehension. Students whose scoreson WLPB-R Word Attack or PassageComprehension were less than 85 wereidentified as nonresponders. Studentswere assessed again at the end of sec-ond grade to determine how many ofthe students who had responded to in-tervention at the end of first grademaintained that responder status, andhow many were at risk again at the endof second grade. Furthermore, thenumber of students who were still at

TABLE 1Pretest Scores on Word Attack and Passage Comprehension, by Group

Intervention Control

Pretest n M SD n M SD

English Study Word Attack 18 89.00 12.4 17 87.88 8.7 Passage Comprehension 20 83.70 15.5 16 82.75 8.2

Spanish Study Word Attack 34 72.68 16.7 34 73.88 17.7 Passage Comprehension 35 70.80 10.3 34 76.03 15.3

Note. In the English study, 24 intervention and 24 control students began the study. At pretest, 6 interven-tion and 6 control students did not obtain scores on Word Attack, and 4 intervention and 7 control studentsdid not obtain scores on Passage Comprehension, likely due to inability. Therefore, the preinterventionscores are biased higher at pretest because they are based on fewer students (those with likely higherskill). At posttest (and both pretest and posttest in the Spanish study), nearly all the students were able toobtain scores on both measures.

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risk at the end of first grade and con-tinued to be at risk at the end of secondgrade was also determined. We alsocompared students who received theresearcher-provided intervention tostudents who received typical schoolservices, and we determined the num-ber of students in each condition whocontinued to thrive in second grade.Table 2 presents the results for studentsin the Spanish study who did and didnot meet RTI criteria at the end ofGrades 1 and 2, and Table 3 presentsthe same results for students in theEnglish study. In these tables, the num-ber and proportion of students at eachtime point is provided as a function ofintervention group and RTI status.

Students Responding toIntervention at the End of Grade 1

Across the two studies, 53 studentscompleted the intervention and wereavailable for testing at the end of firstgrade. Of the 31 students who receivedthe Spanish intervention, 30 respondedto intervention, and of the 22 studentswho received the English intervention,20 responded to the intervention (seeTables 2 and 3). At the end of secondgrade, 40 intervention students wereassessed. All 22 students in the Spanishintervention who were available fortesting still met criteria at the end ofsecond grade, as did 17 of 18 studentsfrom the English intervention whowere available for testing at the end ofsecond grade. Thus, all but one studentresponded to the intervention immedi-ately, and all students maintained theirresponder status through the end ofsecond grade.

Students Not Responding to Intervention at the End of Grade 1

There were only a small number of in-tervention students who did not re-spond to the intervention at the end offirst grade (one student in the Spanishintervention and two students in theEnglish intervention). The nonrespond-

ing student in the Spanish interventionand one of the two nonresponding stu-dents in the English intervention werenot available for testing at the end of second grade. The second non-responding student in the English in-tervention was still at risk at the end ofsecond grade.

Comparison of Intervention and Control Students

The majority of the intervention stu-dents responded to the interventionand maintained that responder statusto the end of second grade. But howdid they compare to control students?A larger percentage of students in theintervention met criteria than did stu-dents in the control condition (see Ta-bles 2 and 3).

Of the 35 control students (24 Span-ish and 11 English) who were availableat the end of second grade, 3 stu-dents—1 in the Spanish study and 2 inthe English study—who had met thestudy criteria initially were at risk atthe end of second grade. One of thecontrol students in the Spanish studywho had scored > 95 on both Word At-tack and Passage Comprehension atthe end of first grade scored < 85 onboth measures at the end of secondgrade, thus returning to at-risk status.The two students in the English studyat risk at the end of second grade hadscored between 85 and 95 on both mea-sures at the end of first grade.

Relative to intervention students,there were a greater number of controlstudents in both the Spanish and En-glish studies who did not meet RTI cri-

TABLE 2Summary of Spanish Intervention Results, by Group and Time

End of Grade 1 End of Grade 2

Outcome Intervention Control Intervention Control

Did not meet RTI criteria n/N 1/31 10/33 0/22 2/24% 3 30 0 8

Met RTI criteria n/N 30/31 23/33 22/22 22/24 % 97 70 100 92

Note. RTI = response to intervention. The difference in number of students between first and second gradeis due to students moving out of the district. Each column sums to 100%, reflecting all of the students ineach condition available at each time point.

TABLE 3Summary of English Intervention Results, by Group and Time

End of Grade 1 End of Grade 2

Outcome Intervention Control Intervention Control

Did not meet RTI criteria n/N 2/22 10/17 1/18 6/11% 9 59 6 55

Met RTI criteria n/N 20/22 7/17 17/18 5/11 % 91 42 94 44

Note. RTI = response to intervention. The difference in the number of students between first and secondgrade is due to students moving out of the district. Each column sums to 100%, reflecting all of the studentsin each condition available at each time point. Three students were available at the end of second gradebut not at the end of first grade.

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teria at the end of first grade. Thirtypercent of the control students in theSpanish study did not meet RTI crite-ria at the end of first grade. Of these 10students, 5 were available at the end ofsecond grade, and only one of them re-mained at risk. The other four studentshad moved out of risk status, with onestudent having scores > 95 on bothWord Attack and Passage Comprehen-sion, and the other three students hadscores between 85 and 95 on at leastone of these measures.

Of the control students who werepart of the English study, 10 (59%) con-trol students did not meet RTI criteriaat the end of first grade. Of these 10students, four were available at the endof second grade for assessment. Threeof these four students were still at riskat the end of second grade, whereasone student moved out of risk status.

Discussion

Response to intervention (RTI) and sci-entifically based reading interventionsare at the core of changes in policy forthe identification of students with LDand of legislation such as the No ChildLeft Behind Act. To ensure that all stu-dents are identified and placed in spe-cial education appropriately, the iden-tification of validated interventionpractices for ELLs and other studentsfrom culturally and linguistically di-verse backgrounds is needed. Under-standing the extent to which RTI is aviable means for identifying studentswho are ELLs with reading disabilitiesis essential.

In this study, we followed at-riskstudents who had participated in afirst-grade experimental study as ei-ther intervention or comparison stu-dents through the end of second grade.The purpose was to determine howmany and which students would re-spond to a comprehensive intervention,and which would not. Furthermore,we were interested in determiningwhether a positive initial response tointervention could be maintainedthrough second grade.

The students who participated inthis study were clearly at risk at the be-ginning of first grade. Initial findingsfrom the study indicated that interven-tion students’ performance on reading-related measures was statistically andpractically significantly higher thanthat of comparison students. All butone student in the Spanish interven-tion met criteria immediately follow-ing the intervention at the end of firstgrade. Furthermore, students in theSpanish intervention who respondedto intervention and were no longer atrisk at the end of first grade main-tained this status in second grade. All22 students who were available forevaluation at the end of second gradehad met criteria at the end of firstgrade, and they again met criteria atthe end of second grade and wouldlikely not be candidates for referral forspecial education (the student whohad not met criteria at the end of firstgrade was unavailable at the end ofsecond grade). This strong and contin-uous response may be due in part tothe transparent nature of Spanish or-thography, so that once students“break the code” when provided ex-plicit and systematic instruction, theyare able to continue building on thatknowledge.

The English intervention resultedin all but two intervention studentsmeeting criteria at the end of firstgrade; one student was still at risk forreading failure at the end of secondgrade and thus would be a candidatefor referral to special education, andthe second student was not availablefor testing. This student’s readingprogress was inadequate based on hisperformance in general education evenwith additional daily intervention infirst grade. A closer look at these twostudents’ pretest scores revealed nodifferences between them and otherstudents who made adequate gains(responders) in terms of language pro-ficiency and academic measures. Thesestudents represent 8% of the interven-tion sample and less than 1% of thetotal number of students screened.These percentages for students who

fail to respond to intervention are inline with previous findings for mono-lingual students (Dickson & Bursuck,1999; O’Connor, 2000; Torgesen et al.,2001; Vaughn, Linan-Thompson, &Hickman-Davis, 2003; Vellutino et al.,1996).

Although we were able to deter-mine the number of students who ben-efited from the interventions and werenot likely to require special education,we were not able to identify any crite-ria that would indicate which studentswould benefit from the interventionsbased on pretest scores. There were nodifferences between the students whoresponded and those who did not re-spond in terms of language profi-ciency, and given that all students metthe same eligibility criteria for the studyand performed at or near baseline lev-els on most assessments, neither didacademic performance. In this study,all intervention students received thesame level of instruction in terms of in-tensity and duration. Future research—particularly research that follows largernumbers of students and is likely toyield group differences between thosewho do and those who do not re-spond—might also examine if there aredifferences in how much instructionstudents need to move out of the riskcategory based on their pretest scores.

The intervention that students re-ceived was intensive—50 min a day for7 months. One could argue that thistype of results with an intervention ofsuch intensity would be expected, butis such an intervention necessary?Could students have made similargains and maintained them with a lessintensive intervention or with just tra-ditional classroom instruction? The re-sults of this study suggest that tradi-tional classroom instruction alone isinsufficient; for example, 91% of thestudents who received the English in-tervention met criteria at the end offirst grade, compared to only 41% ofthe control students. This difference isnoteworthy. It is possible that the sys-tematic, explicit, and redundant natureof the intervention provided the sup-port that students needed to acquire an

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understanding of the structure of En-glish as they developed literacy skills.In Spanish, the difference was less ap-parent, as nearly all students who re-ceived intervention (97%) respondedto it and 67% of the control studentsalso met the established criteria. Fur-thermore, the majority of control stu-dents who had been at risk at the endof first grade lost their at-risk status bythe end of second grade. Thus, at-riskELL students being instructed in En-glish may require intervention servicesat an earlier time point relative to theirpeers who are instructed in Spanish.These results indicate that students inboth the Spanish and English controlgroups did not meet benchmark stan-dards for reading gains at the samerate as students who received the in-terventions. There was also evidence tosuggest that even if the control stu-dents met criteria at the end of firstgrade, they did not necessarily meetcriteria at the end of second grade.That is, in terms of referrals to specialeducation, students who received onlyclassroom instruction with school-provided supplemental support wouldbe more likely to be referred for specialeducation services than students whoreceived the comprehensive, yearlongsupplemental intervention provided inthis study. Although a daily, year-longintervention may be labor intensiveand expensive to provide, it is un-doubtedly more cost-effective and, wesuggest, more appropriate than incor-rectly identifying students for specialeducation.

In this study, we used standardscores on decoding and comprehen-sion measures to determine RTI andrisk status. Students were consideredto have responded to the interventionif their scores were within 1 SD fromthe mean on both tests. Using these cri-teria, 97% of intervention studentswho responded initially maintainedtheir status as responders through sec-ond grade. This represents a higherpercentage of students than previousstudies, in which as few as 66% of thestudents who received 20 weeks of in-tervention were able to thrive in the

general education classroom withoutsupplemental instruction (Vaughn,Linan-Thompson, & Hickman-Davis,2003). These differences could be at-tributed to several factors, such as theduration and intensity of the interven-tion. Moreover, the use of standardscores on untimed measures ratherthan fluency measures may have con-tributed to the higher percentage ofstudents who met criteria. In a previ-ous study with second-grade students(Vaughn, Linan-Thompson, & Hickman-Davis, 2003), rapid automatic namingwas the best predictor of students whowould meet exit criteria. Fluency isamong the most difficult aspects ofreading to influence through interven-tion (Torgesen et al., 2001; Vellutino et al., 1996), so the use of fluencymeasures in addition to the untimedmeasures might have yielded differentresults.

Furthermore, the observed growthand RTI on Passage Comprehension atfirst grade should be interpreted withcaution, in view of the fact that scoresat this level tend to be inflated. Thereare few items at this level; therefore,gains on standard scores are due to rel-ative small gains in raw scores.

We believe that the findings fromthis study provide some initial supportfor the benefits of RTI models withELLs at risk for reading disabilities,with the consideration of a need forfurther research. These findings sug-gest that ELLs at risk for readingdisabilities who are provided with ex-plicit, systematic, and intensive inter-ventions make substantive gains thatdistinguish them from control studentsand leave them less at risk for referralto special education. These gains areevident in both Spanish and English.We think it would be valuable to repli-cate this research with older studentsand with ELLs from other languagegroups. We also recognize that thesefindings are the result of an expensiveand intensive intervention imple-mented with fidelity. Whether thesefindings could have been obtainedwith a less intensive intervention re-quires further study.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Sylvia Linan-Thompson, PhD, is an assis-tant professor at The University of Texas atAustin. Her research interests include develop-ment of reading interventions for strugglingreaders who are monolingual English speakers,English language learners, and bilingual stu-dents acquiring Spanish literacy. SharonVaughn, PhD, is the H.E. Hartfelder/SouthlandCorp. Regents Chair at the University of Texas.Her research addresses academic and social out-comes for students with reading difficulties andlearning disabilities. Kathryn Prater, PhD, isan assistant professor at the University of NorthCarolina, Greensboro. Her research interests in-clude beginning literacy development andteacher professional development. Paul T.Cirino, PhD, is a developmental neuropsychol-ogist and research assistant professor at theTexas Institute for Measurement, Evaluation,and Statistics (TIMES) at the University ofHouston. His current interests include diagno-sis, concomitants, and intervention with mathand reading disabilities, working memory andexecutive functions, and measurement. Ad-dress: Sylvia Linan-Thompson, The Universityof Texas at Austin, Department of Special Edu-cation, 1 University Station, D5300, Austin,TX 78712; email: sylvialt@mail.utexas.edu

AUTHORS’ NOTE

This research was funded by a grant from theNational Institute of Child Health and HumanDevelopment and the Institute of EducationalSciences (Grant Award PO1 HD 39,521, De-velopment of English Literacy in Spanish-Speaking Children).

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