Guided reading: a powerful tool for teaching reading skills to ESL learners

Step-by-step guide for teachers explaining how to help ESL students improve their reading skills by teaching them cognitive strategies using a guided reading approach

Teaching ESL students how to read English texts can be difficult for many teachers, especially new ones who haven’t yet learned all the helpful strategies for doing so. When starting out as a teacher myself, one such strategy that proved to be a gamechanger for me was guided reading, which I continue to use in my everyday teaching practices. If you’re just now learning about this highly effective teaching strategy, here’s how it works and how you can apply it in the classroom.

What is guided reading?

Guided reading is a strategy that you can use to teach your students how to read in English more effectively. Rather than simply explaining parts of a text or story to students to help them understand it better, you can teach them different cognitive approaches that they can then use to enhance their reading skills and comprehension.

This normally involves some level of basic support in the beginning, known as teacher-scaffolding, where you’ll use some subtle techniques of your own to help students apply their newly learned reading strategies to what they’re reading.

Steps to implement guided reading:

To implement guided reading in a lesson, you can follow these recommended steps, which are the exact steps I use whenever taking a guided reading approach:

1. Warm-up (introducing the topic)

You should start your lesson with a basic warm-up that’s typically anywhere between five to ten minutes in duration, depending on your time constraints. You’ll begin by introducing the topic that you’d like your students to learn about.

This is different from the reading strategies you’ll be teaching your students later. The topic is whatever broad concept you’ll want your students to read and learn about, whether it’s outer space, animals, transportation, culture, or virtually anything else.

You can introduce the topic quickly using virtually any medium, such as:

• A short video
• A song or story
• A board drawing
• A quick discussion

The point of introducing the topic is simply to get students comfortable and excited about what they’re about to learn, as the strategies themselves can be a bit complex. So you’ll want to choose a medium and topic that is age- and level-appropriate and that will generate interest. This interest then translates to intrinsic motivation, where the students will want to use the strategies you teach them to read about the topic and understand more about it.

2. Teaching guided reading strategies

Next, after your students have had at least five to ten minutes to learn about the topic and become interested in it, you’ll then introduce some of the cognitive and reading strategies they can use to make reading easier for them while explaining these in the simplest terms possible.

It’s up to you which specific strategies you’ll introduce to them, but the following are some of the core strategies I recommend going through with them:

Activation of prior knowledge

It’s well-known that one of the best ways to learn something new is by activating prior knowledge, which essentially means that you’re using things you’re already familiar with to make sense of concepts and things that are new to you.

This is a cognitive strategy your students should be familiar with, and you can teach them this by simply having them ask themselves things like, “What do I already know about this topic?” By asking this, they’re filling in some of the blanks if there are any things that they’re already familiar with that they can connect to the topic before learning more about it.

Objective self-questioning

Once students have activated their prior knowledge, they can move on to self-questioning, another cognitive strategy. To self-question, you’ll have your students think about the text and ask themselves questions about it before, during, and after reading.

For example, students might ask themselves, “Am I understanding what I’m reading?” or “What other questions of mine has this text answered, and what else would I like to know?”

This helps teach critical-thinking skills, which your students will need when reading more advanced texts, and it also helps them identify what they’re learning by drawing their attention to it, leading to better retention and recall of this knowledge later on.

Chunking into smaller parts

Chunking is a reading strategy that refers to breaking down the text into smaller, manageable sections or chunks, reading small portions, and then using self-questioning to ensure that you understand those parts before moving on to other sections.

With larger texts and older students, the sections chunked are normally a paragraph or two at a time, but for younger students who are reading smaller texts, you may want to teach them how to chunk sentences first, then whole paragraphs later. This focuses their attention on what they’re reading, prevents them from getting overwhelmed with too much information all at once, and leads to better comprehension.

Summarizing what was read

Once your students have applied the previous strategies while reading, they can then summarize what they’ve read after they’ve finished reading the whole text. This serves as a way of double-checking their comprehension to ensure that they understood what was read. It also enhances memory by encouraging students to recall what was read and further ingrains this into their knowledge base.

Summarizing involves condensing the main ideas and key details of a text into a concise paragraph or statement. You can simply ask your students to write down what the central theme of a story was and what some of the important details in it were. Students can then discover if there are any gaps in their understanding and can then review the text to see what they may have missed.

Other suggested strategies:
While the previous strategies are all core elements of the guided reading process, the following are some other strategies you can teach them as part of your lesson:

• Making connections – connecting what is being read to things students are already familiar with in real life.
• Using visualizations – Imagining what is being read, whether its actions, characters, or places, as mental images in the mind.
• Drawing inferences – predicting what is being said or where a story is headed based on contextual clues.
• Self-monitoring – recognizing when something is not being understood or read correctly and going back to re-read something as necessary.

3. Model the reading strategies for students

Simply explaining strategies often isn’t enough for your students to understand how to practically use them, especially with younger students. For this reason, you’ll want to model the strategies by showing students exactly how they can apply them in their reading.

How you go about doing this is up to you, but I’ll typically consider whether the strategy involves mostly internal or external processes. Something that’s occurring internally, such as self-questioning when reading a text, I’ll demonstrate by asking myself questions out loud in front of the students.

While something like chunking is meant to be performed internally as a cognitive process, when first teaching this concept to students, you can demonstrate it externally by underlining or circling parts of a text that you’d normally be chunking in your mind.

Students can then perform this externally as well while reading, which will eventually lead to the ability to do this internally. The same goes for summarizing, which can be demonstrated externally by simply writing a summary of a text directly next to it on the board in front of students.

4. Carry out a guided reading activity

To ensure your students can apply the strategies they’ve learned to their reading, you’ll now have your students read a story, and you’ll walk around the room offering support (teacher-scaffolding) if you see any students struggling.

Ask them to use all the strategies you taught them and provide them with a sheet of paper or somewhere where they can write down notes or summarize what they’ve read. It’s important that you guide them while encouraging them to make sense of what they’re reading using the strategies, as this is a guided reading activity, and don’t just provide answers to them if they have questions.

Tip: use Socratic questioning
An effective way to assist your students when they have questions is by using Socratic questioning. If a student asks you about a specific detail in a story, instead of giving them an answer, you can ask them questions that encourage them to discover the answer on their own, which is a strategy known as Socratic questioning.
Example:
Student: “Why does the astronaut need to wear a helmet outside the shuttle?”
Teacher: “Well, how might the conditions in space be different from earth?”

5. Evaluate your students with an assessment

After the reading activity, I’ll normally carry out an assessment, such as a worksheet or quiz, to make sure that the students understood what they read. While it’s difficult to ensure that they’ve used the strategies I’ve taught them, I’ll usually make sure that there are sections on the assessment that address this.

I’ll typically include one section that asks about the main concept of the story or theme, one where they’ll write down important details from the story, and another where I’ll ask for a summary of the story. This, along with multiple-choice questions, usually helps cover all the bases to make sure they understood what was read and used the learned strategies to at least some degree.

Remember: guide but don’t lead

The point of using guided reading is to guide your students into the reading process by equipping them with strategies that they can use on their own. This is similar to the analogy of teaching someone how to fish rather than catching a fish for them.

By providing scaffolding support to your students but not directly providing answers to them, they’ll gain confidence as they learn how to analyze texts, think about them critically, and eventually learn the skills to lead themselves to any answers they’re looking for.