Home / Programs / Wilson Reading System / WRS Standards Alignment

Wilson Reading System® Standards Alignment

The Wilson Reading System® (WRS) strongly supports students’ ability to meet states’ rigorous college- and career-ready Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy, including Common Core State Standards, by providing an intensive intervention program (Tier 3) that addresses the foundational skills required to read and write.

For students in a Tier 3 intervention, it is critical that they receive a program of instruction that ensures mastery of foundational skills of language structure that are typically taught in grades K-3. Without this mastery, students will not successfully achieve grade-level standards beyond grade 3.

As a targeted intensive intervention for this population of students, the WRS program is not grade specific. As a result, a one-to-one correlation with the states’ standards by grade level is not straightforward since of many of the skills presented in the program fall outside of the grade-level standards outlined for these particular students.

Reading Standards: Foundational Skills

WRS is designed for students who have a language-based learning disability with a primary word-level deficit and require an intensive reading intervention. Students who are identified to receive WRS instruction are not able to engage with grade-level complex reading and writing tasks because they are not yet fluent readers or writers. WRS provides these students with the foundational and language standards that are absolutely necessary to be able access grade-level text. In this regard, WRS aligns with the following key foundational and writing standards:

  • Know and apply phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words.
  • Read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension.
  • Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing.

Reading Standards: Literature and Informational Text

WRS also strongly supports the Anchor Standards in Reading:

  • Key Ideas and Details
  • Craft and Structure
  • Integration of Knowledge and Ideas
  • Reading and Level of Text Complexity

WRS develops comprehension explicitly throughout the curriculum in Parts 9 and 10 of the daily lesson plan. In Part 9 of the lesson plan, students focus on short controlled passages allowing students with emerging decoding skills the opportunity to develop fluency and reading comprehension strategies. Part 10 provides teachers the opportunity to deeply engage students in high-quality texts.

When engaging in reading and discussing text, WRS teachers use a process called Wilson Comprehension S.O.S.TM (Stop – Orient – Scaffold/Support). As the student or teacher reads, they intermittently stop and interact to support the student’s understanding of the text. It is intended to guide students’ comprehension and teach students through modeling and discussion. This establishes a deep understanding, rather than surface understanding, of content. The Comprehension S.O.S. process engages students in rich and rigorous evidence-based conversations about text–the skill of close reading as outlined in states’ standards, including the Common Core State Standards.

Language and Speaking Standards

The Comprehension S.O.S. process and Part 10 of the lesson plan (Listening Comprehension) also supports the Language and Speaking Standards. Students engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussion on topics and texts. Students determine main ideas and supporting details of a text read aloud, and report on a topic or text with appropriate facts and relevant descriptive details, speaking clearly at an understandable pace. Students develop vocabulary from listening to informational and narrative text.