Reading interventions in high school for ELs with disabilities
What do we know about interventions in high school?
Over in the journal Education Sciences, Lisa Bowman-Perrott and her colleagues—Richard Boon, Kathy Ewoldt, Mack Burke, Sohreh Eslami, and Azizullah Mirzaei—published a review article in which they examined interaction research about teaching students who have identified disabilities, particularly those who are also English Language Leaners and at the secondary level. Although they found few compelling studies, they derived some potentially valuable guidance.
Given the increasing numbers of students in the US identified as having disabilities and as English learners, the limited number of studies of expressly addressing that population, and the need to provide them with evidence-based instruction, Professor Bowman-Perrott and her colleagues conducted a systematic review and analysis of the available reports of research. They wanted to learn the characteristics of the students with disabilities and EL status who were receiving high school reading interventions, the characteristics of the reading interventions, and the outcomes for the students receiving those interventions.
Study procedures and findings
They employed PRISMA guidelines1 in gathering and selecting studies, finding 105 reports, 10 of which were usable. They then reviewed each report, recording specific features of them such as pupil characteristics (e.g., pupil age, gender, native language, etc.) and intervention characteristics (e.g., intervention agents, settings, intervention duration, etc.).
Because they were able to identify only 10 studies that included important, relevant data, they were had to limit the report of their findings. Their results did reveal, however, that most of the 106 EL students in the study, 100 were identified as having learning disabilities; some of the EL students qualified for special education in more than one disability category). Of the students for whom gender was noted, slight more than 2 in 3 were males. The EL students ethnic backgrounds were mostly Hispanic, American Indian/Alaska Native, and White. The students’ native languages were not consistently reported in the studies, and the team summarized the students’ English proficiency by study (not students) level. The students mostly read at levels from the first through sixth grade (mean = fourth grade), but these data were available in only seven studies.
The research team reported that six of the studies used single-case research methods and one used a group-contrast design. Outcomes were measured in familiar ways (e.g., words read correctly), with most studies using researcher-developed measures. Many were focused on whether students completed parts of an intervention strategy properly. Few examined achievement per se, so it’s not possible to say what methods actually “work” with EL students with disabilities at the high school level.
The first paragraph of the authors’ discussion of their study provided an accurate summary of their findings:
We gleaned several key takeaways from this review of the literature. They are as follows. First, we found few reading intervention studies focused on high-school-aged ELs with disabilities. Of the studies we identified, sample sizes were small. Our search yielded only five peer-reviewed studies and two doctoral dissertations over the past 49 years, from 1975 to the present. This clearly highlights the need for more research in this area. Also, the sample size of ELs with disabilities across the studies was relatively small, ranging from 3 to 19 participants per study. The exception was the study conducted by Williams and Vaughn (2020), which included 85 ELs with an LD.
Commentary
For those of us who would like clear and obvious recommendations about what to do for English Learners with disabilities, the findings of this review are underwhelming. That judgement is not so much a comment on the work by Professor Bowman-Perrott and her colleagues as it is on the state of the research literature that they found. That the research team was only able to identify 10 studies after their hard work2 must have been disappointing.
Professor Bowman-Perrott and her colleagues are not alone in having to work with a limited set of studies that have quite disparate findings. Similar difficulties have confronted researchers who have examined other areas (e.g., reading comprehension for students with intellectual disabilities; Joseph et al., 2023). One may find a few highly focused and well-done studies (e.g., Graves & Burns, 2024), but there just are very few well-conceived and conducted studies like Williams and Vaughn (2020).
It is, in my view, bad news that we don’t have a robust and strong literature from which we can draw recommendations. It’s just difficult to make evidence-based recommendations when one doesn’t have a good evidence base. This is not so say that there is no sensible direction available. There is good guidance about secondary literacy instruction in papers by several author teams (see Capin et al., 2020; Hall et al. 2019; Wexler et al., 2022). But, when we narrow the focus to subgroups or to specific practices, the evidence about them is scant.
The review by Professor Bowman-Perrott and colleagues is open access (copyright https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) meaning that it is freely available on the Internet. Just follow the digital object identifier in the reference.
A couple (how many?) of the authorship team are readers of Special Education Today; stay alert, as you might spot them wandering about here. However, please note that they didn’t provide any inducements to SET for the coverage of their article.
References
Bowman-Perrott, L., Boon, R. T., Ewoldt, K. B., Burke, M. D., Eslami, Z., & Mirzaei, A. (2025). Reading interventions to support English learners with disabilities in high school: A systematic review. Education Sciences, 15(2), 223. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci15020223
Capin, P., Hall, C., Stevens, E. A., Steinle, P. K., & Murray, C. S. (2024). Evidence-based reading instruction for secondary students with reading difficulties within multitiered systems of support. Teaching Exceptional Children, 56(5), 370-385. https://doi.org/10.1177/00400599221079643
Graves, K. A., & Burns, M. K. (2024). Using brief experimental analysis to compare the effects of reading comprehension interventions with a middle school student. Single Case in the Social Sciences, 1(1), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.15763/issn.1936-9298.2024.1.1.1-14
Hall, C., Steinle, P. K., & Vaughn, S. (2019). Reading instruction for English learners with learning disabilities: What do we already know, and what do we still need to learn? In D. J. Francis (Ed.), Identification, classification, and treatment of reading and language disabilities in Spanish-speaking EL students (pp. 145–189). Wiley
Joseph, L., Ross, K., Xia, Q., Amspaugh, L. A., & Accurso, J. (2023). Reading comprehension instruction for students with intellectual disabilities: A systematic literature review. International Journal of Disability, Development and Education, 70(3), 314-339. https://doi.org/10.1080/1034912X.2021.1892033
Wexler, J., Kearns, D. M., Lemons, C. J., Shelton, A., Pollack, M. S., Stapleton, L. M., Clancy, R., Hogan, E, & Lyon, C. (2022). Improving literacy instruction in co-taught middle school classrooms to support reading comprehension. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 68, 102040. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2021.102040
Williams, K. J., & Vaughn, S. (2020). Effects of an intensive reading intervention for ninth-grade English learners with learning disabilities. Learning Disability Quarterly, 43(3), 154-166. https://doi.org/10.1177/0731948719851745
Footnote
Following the PRISMA guidance is a strength of this review. Another, while I’m on the subject, is that the authors covered an extended period (back to 1974), unlike lots of reviews that start from an arbitrary recent date.
I feel pretty safe in saying that this is hard work. The searching and coding sustained and intense planning and execution, honest. Every year for many ~20 years, I taught a class about doing these sorts of studies.