Guided Reading: A Research-Based Response to the Challenges of Early Reading Instruction

An evaluation of guided reading in three primary schools in the Western Cape

“…Thus, Guided Reading builds the process of individual reading and it teaches children how the reading process works (McPherson, 2007:1;Kouri, Riley & Selle, 2006: 236;Schwarts, 2005: 442). Because Guided Reading teaches children how to construct meaning independently from text under a teacher's supportive guidance, it is particularly appropriate for children who are in the early years of literacy development and for the lowest performing children (Iaquinta, 2006:413 (Fountas & Pinnell, 1996Hornsby, 2000:30-34).…”

Exploring Early Reading Instructional Strategies to Advance the Print Literacy Development of Adolescent SLIFE

“…Guided reading is an important contemporary reading instructional practice (Iaquinta, ). It is a socially supported practice that can provide useful information about how to support all students as they process texts.…”

Identifying effective reading intervention strategies for Grade 2 and 3 students

“…Although grouping of students appeared to be based on individual reading ability, the groups never seemed to change. The groups remained static, the vocabulary was pre-taught and controlled, and the old basal readers always contained the same, predictable stories (Iaquinta, 2006). Iaquinta further argued that students worked in workbooks or completed worksheet activities, previously known as exercises, to show their understanding of what had been read, out loud, during round-robin reading (tum-taking, reading a line or a page) sessions.…”

“…To address the challenges of early reading instruction, Iaquinta (2006) discussed how guided reading, an approach to reading instruction based on Clay's Reading Recovery™, best fits into a balanced literacy program found in many oftoday' s classrooms. The crucial focus during the primary grades is to prevent learning failure (Reynolds, Wheldall, & Madelaine, 2010).…”

“…Students are instructed on how to read increasingly more difficult text with understanding and fluency, coupled with how to construct the meaning of text while utilizing problem-solving strategies to figure out unfamiliar vocabulary found within complex sentence structures. As students develop their confidence in reading more difficult text, their network of strategies also broadens, thus allowing them to attend to information from different sources (Iaquinta, 2006). As Clay (1993) indicated, these sources of information can be clustered into the three cueing systems of reading known as the semantic (meaning), syntactic (language structure), and graphophonemic (visual information) systems.…”