The following post is from a colleague who is special education advocate, a trained mediator, and past President of the Illinois Chapter of the International Dyslexia Association. She has a great deal of expertise and experience in the area of reading methodologies and knowledge of needed remediations for reading-based disabilities. She has written this post on the subject of guided reading, at my request, since many schools [mis]represent that Guided Reading is appropriate to teach students struggling with a reading disability. I will post a second part tomorrow relating to research-based methods that are appropriate to address the issues that students with reading disabilities face in the classroom.
If you were an observer in a classroom using Guided Reading strategies,
you would see small groups of students reading similar books that are
"leveled" for the child’s reading ability. The teacher would initiate a
pre-reading discussion focused on establishing the purpose for reading.
She might discuss predicting (talking about what might happen next in
the story), or pre-teach some vocabulary the child might encounter.
Perhaps she’ll talk about something in the book that the children have
no knowledge of or experience with.
During the reading process, the teacher observes the readers in their
small group and when necessary, may intervene with a strategy that
encourages a reader to use the context of the passage to help decode a
word. After reading, she leads a post-reading activity to ensure that
the children comprehend the passage.
This works relatively well (though not terrifically) for the 80% of the
population that are traditional learners. But what of the 20% that have
difficulty decoding, making sense of the printed word, or flat out
can’t read? Their needs are not being met. What is not occurring during
Guided Reading, yet is essential, is instruction in decoding: the
ability to read words automatically the way good readers do.
For a child with a language-based learning disability, like dyslexia,
decoding strategies in guided reading encourage a guessing habit which
is difficult to overcome. When a child encounters an unfamiliar word,
he or she is encouraged to look at the first letter, and/or look at the
picture, and consider what word "might make sense" in the sentence.
Another strategy is called "chunking" and it encourages children to
find smaller words within the larger word. The words "moth" and "the"
can be seen in the word "mother," but will not facilitate proper
pronunciation of the word. Providing decoding strategies when an
unfamiliar word is encountered in a passage is considered implicit
phonics instruction – these strategies are inefficient at best.
Evidence-based research shows that by teaching language patterns
explicitly, students become better decoders, which leads to more
automaticity, which in turn fosters comprehension. If a child’s eyes
pause to recognize each word, reading for meaning is difficult, and
fluency will be painfully slow. Comprehension will be poor because the
brain receives information in small bits. With explicit phonics
instruction the rewards are cumulative: language makes sense, the
reading process is no longer so frustrating and exhausting, and
children choose to read, expanding their world through books.