JET: A Fast-Paced Reading Intervention for 14 Years and Older

JET: A Fast-Paced Reading Intervention is a one-year curriculum written by the staff of the Luke Waites Center for Dyslexia and Learning Disorders at Scottish Rite for Children. Jet builds on the success of the four previous dyslexia intervention programs developed by the Scottish Rite for Children staff: Alphabetic Phonics, the Dyslexia Training Program, the Scottish Rite for Children Literacy Program, and Take Flight Elementary.

Jet was designed for:

  • individuals with dyslexia fourteen years and older

  • one-on-one or small group instruction (no more than 6 students)

  • Use by a Certified Academic Language Therapist

  • Four days a week – sixty minutes per day for one year

    or

  • Five days a week – forty-five minutes per day for one year

Five Components of Effective Reading Instruction

Jet contains the five components of effective reading instruction identified by research from the National Reading Panel. Jet addresses each component by:

  1. Phonemic Awareness – following established procedures for explicitly teaching the relationships between speechsound production and spelling-sound patterns.

  2. Phonics – providing a systematic approach for single-word decoding.

  3. Fluency – using research-proven, directed practice in repeated reading of words, phrases and passages to help individuals read newly encountered text more fluently.

  4. Vocabulary – featuring multiple word learning strategies (definitional, structural, contextual) and explicit teaching techniques with application in text.

  5. Reading Comprehension – teaching individuals to explicitly use and articulate multiple comprehension strategies in narrative and expository text (i.e., cooperative learning, story structure, question generation and answering, summarization, and comprehension monitoring).

Jet is designed around these key findings of Take Flight Elementary that include:

  • Students who complete Jet instruction show significant growth in all areas of reading skill.

  • Follow-up research on children who completed treatment indicates that students maintain the benefits of instruction on word reading skills and continue to improve in reading comprehension after one year.

  • Jet is effective when used in schools by teachers with advanced training in treating learning disorders.

  • Students with the lowest reading skills acquire the strongest gains from Jet instruction.