Questions about 'Guided Reading'

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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Joined: Sat May 23, 2015 4:42 pm

Questions about 'Guided Reading'

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

Questions often arise as to the efficacy and advisability of 'Guided Reading' and so I thought it would be a good idea to start a thread on this topic.

I'm launching with an excellent post by Gordon Askew via his 'ssphonix' blog:

http://ssphonix.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/ ... ase_7.html

When I provide teacher-training, I include this issue as, like Gordon, I'm well aware that most teachers are still required to do 'Guided Reading' or choose to do it - so what does 'it' look like - and how might teachers modify their approach for the benefit of their pupils relative to their reading abilities?

And, like Gordon, I note that schools are well-stocked with sets of 'Guided Reading Books' - more often than not 'bookbanded' which is a multi-cueing Reading Recovery approach to cataloguing and which is at odds with the use of cumulative, decodable reading material to enable beginners and strugglers to apply their alphabetic code knowledge and blending skill in order to build up their reading fluency and confidence. Why would we ask children to read books independently with words that they cannot hope to decode?

I usually introduce this topic shortly after talking about the introduction of the 'Simple View of Reading' model which was adopted officially in England in 2006 as a 'useful conceptual framework'. The diagram for the Simple View of Reading is so helpful to consider the two main processes of being a reader in the full sense that I encourage teachers to share the diagram with parents too - why wouldn't they? After all, that is surely what 'working in partnership with parents' is about - giving them clear information about the rationale for our reading instruction practices.

Here is the 'Simple View of Reading' diagram:

http://www.phonicsinternational.com/The ... _model.pdf

The Simple View of Reading diagram enables us to consider the reading profiles of children - and from this we can reflect on the needs of the children and, to be honest, we can also reflect on our teaching practices and provision too.

When providing 'Guided Reading' or simply 'Group Reading', teachers can bear in mind the needs of the children from both the technical perspective (how good is their code knowledge and blending skill) and their level of language comprehension (children with more than one language may have excellent language comprehension in their mother tongue and much weaker language comprehension in the additional language - so children can be plotted for both languages on the Simple View of Reading diagram).

Then, the sets of matched books in the school need to be audited! When the notion of Guided Reading reached England in a 'big' way, schools invested in many sets of matched books to provide reading practice by the Guided Reading approach. Now, some of these books will be really good quality (content) and others simply aren't. Use those books for cutting up for collages or something!!!

I would add, however, that some books have very good content but the texts are too challenging for some beginners - but the content is still important for building up knowledge and understanding of the world, for example.

There are times, then, when it would be very good for weaker readers to enjoy a Guided Reading session where the teacher or supporting adult is doing the reading and collectively the adult and children can enjoy the contents and the focus is actually on the 'language comprehension' on that occasion.

We don't want to give our slower readers the message that they never get to enjoy the books that other groups get to share, and so I would urge teachers to be mindful of the need for children to practise with plenty of cumulative, decodable reading books for individual reading, home reading and Guided/Group Reading, but also to be mindful of developing language comprehension and knowledge and understanding of the world through what may be more content-rich and more substantial books.
Yvonne Meyer
Posts: 12
Joined: Sat Jun 06, 2015 12:08 am

Re: Questions about 'Guided Reading'

Post by Yvonne Meyer »

Evidence-based beginning reading instruction informs us that the sub-set skills of beginning reading are phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Progress has been made (to a greater or lesser extent) in the teaching of phonemic awareness & phonics, but an exact understanding of fluency and how to teach it remains a mystery to many teachers. These teachers are often confused by the term, guided reading, which is used by advocates of Whole Language/whole word & the constructivist philosophy to mean the teacher encourages the students to use memorising and guessing strategies to 'gain meaning from text'.

Guided reading in an evidence-based beginning reading programme means the teacher chooses reading text that only includes sound/letter correspondences that the students have learnt, allowing the students to practice decoding to the level of fluency.

Fluency, also called automaticity and/or mastery, requires the over-learning of sound/letter correspondences and repeated practice of reading decodable text so that working memory is freed from the constraints of the decoding process and is able to fully engage in the vocabulary and comprehension skills necessary for 'reading to learn'.

An excellent website with very clear explanations of all aspect of beginning reading is 5 BIG IDEAS IN BEGINNING READING. The link to the section on fluency follows.

Fluency

• Concepts and Research
• Instruction
• Assessment

http://reading.uoregon.edu/big_ideas/flu/index.php

The following paper written by Kerry Hempenstall for the NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR DIRECT INSTRUCTION is also very good and contains many references.

Fluency: Its significance and promotion
• 

The conventional wisdom that one should learn to crawl before learning to walk has been ignored by those who consider that beginners should be encouraged to read in the way that skilled readers do (Goodman, 1973, 1974). The evidence on literacy (analogous to many other life skills) indicates the need to ensure that students develop instantaneous word recognition. For this to occur, teachers must first emphasise the minutiae of decoding, and ensure that all students obtain their requisite levels of practice to enable the achievement of that most important quality, automaticity. It is a state of skill development in which tasks that formerly required concentration to complete competently, having been practised to the point of over-learning, are now able to be completed without conscious attention (Baker, Kame’enui, Simmons, & Stahl, 1994; Thompson & Nicholson, 1998).

All readers have a limited amount of attentional capacity to devote to the reading task. If the basic process of extracting the words from the page is laboured (slow and usually error-prone), readers will lose track of that which already has been read (Mastropieri, Leinart, & Scruggs, 1999), and be unable to follow the text’s sequence of ideas (Kamhi & Catts, 1999). They will also remain essentially passive during the reading task, not able to bring their own experiences to bear on the all-important meaningmaking process, and hence their comprehension is doubly hindered. Because of the additional effort required, they are likely to be reading less than their peers and their resultant slower vocabulary development further impedes comprehension (Mastropieri et al., 1999). Sometimes these struggling readers are exhorted to pay more attention to meaning (Newman, 1985) than to the words in front of them – a cruel, if unintentionally so, diversion away from the problem source. With automaticity, all available attention can be directed to the meaning-making task, because the lower-level decoding process is effortless. Unsurprisingly then, research has shown that fluency and comprehension are mutually interdependent (Mathes, Howard, Allen, & Fuchs, 1998).

http://www.nifdi.org/news-latest-2/blog ... -promotion

The CHILDREN OF THE CODE interviews below on fluency are also very interesting.

Fluency
Index:
• Breaking the Code, Developing Reflexes and Fluency - Whitehurst, G. (Educational Research)
• Fluency and the Basic-Proficiency Spectrum - Whitehurst, G. (Educational Research)
• Proficient, Fluent Reading Doesn't Require Conscious Processing - Whitehurst, G. (Educational Research)
• Left Side of the Brain - The Word Forming Area Key to Fluency - Shaywitz, S. (Pediatric Neuroscience)
• Hesitation Impedes Fluency - Breznitz, Z. (Neurocognitive Research)
• Disfluency and Public Shame - Lyon, Reid, G. (Educational Research)
• Fluency and the Matthew Effect - Cunningham, A. (Educational Research)
• Radiant Effects of Disfluent Reading - Whitehurst, G. (Educational Research)
• Vocabulary and Fluency - Shanahan, T. (Literacy Research)
• Connections Between Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary & Comprehension - Lyon, Reid, G. (Educational Research)
• Fluency and the DIBELS Assessment - Kame'enui, E. (Educational Research)
• Code Processing, Fluency and Comprehension - Kame'enui, E. (Educational Research)
• Success in School Depends on Fluent Reading - Whitehurst, G. (Educational Research)
• Slow Readers Need More Time - Shaywitz, S. (Pediatric Neuroscience)
• Disfluent Reading Costs Seven or Eight Times as Much to Remediate - Wendorf, J. (Learning Disabilities Research)
• Children's Futures all but Fated by Reading - Whitehurst, G. (Educational Research)
• Fluent Reading is Not a Model of How to Teach Reading - Stanovich, K. (Cognitive Science)
Not Having Reading Fluency is Missing Out - Whitehurst, G. (Educational Research)

http://www.childrenofthecode.org/librar ... luency.htm
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