Group Reading & Rereading Easy Appropriate texts Daily

Revisiting the Familiar

Background:      The instructional strategy of Repeated Reading Grread is underpinned by the belief that comprehension can be enhanced when an individual reads the same text time and time again as Clay (1991, p.16) elaborates in the following way.

“Being allowed to read familiar books is rare in schools.  Adults seem only interested in children reading unseen text.  Because several readings increase familiarity,teachers are wary of

‘memorising’.  Reading however, is not about memorising words.It is what the child brings to the book they read last week or last week –an awareness of plot and character, of meanings

and of language  structures and words – that provides the half-recalled context for the re-reading. The reading task is still new and challenging because the child is bringing that prior

knowledge to the text, and this time the child may notice things hat he failed to attend to on previous reading.  When children are allowed to re-read familiar material they are being allowed

to learn to be readers, to read in ways which draw on all their language  resources and knowledge of the world, to put this very complex recall and sequencing behaviour into a fluent

rendering of the text  … Now the support is coming from his own prior reading.  That familiarity is supporting his move towards further independence as a reader.”    Clay, M.M. (1991) Becoming literate.  The construction of inner control.   Heinemann.

When a reader revisits the familiar, their comprehension skills are enhanced. They can make more text-to-text and text-to-self connections.  They develop a heightened awareness of the syntactic structures,  the vocabulary,  the high frequency words, the orthographic and phonological elements of the text which all contribute to fluent reading. In agreement with the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (2000a) p. 11, “fluency is one of several critical factors necessary for reading comprehension “but” is often neglected in the classroom”. [1]

[1] National Institute of Child Heath and Human Development (200b) Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching
Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction. Reports of the Subgroups. Washington, DC: National Institutes of Health.

Grread (1 teacher & 4-5 children) : is a 5 week, 20 minute per day reading strategy that provides ‘like’ groups of readers (same instructional level), the opportunity to read massive amounts of appropriate texts aloud daily.  It is a strategy for all readers and particularly for:

* Readers who do not read in a phrased, fluent or expressive way

* Readers experiencing difficulties with comprehension

* Students who do not have opportunities to read outside school hours

* Students who have been at school for 6 months or more and are finding Level 1 texts hard

* English as additional language (EAL) learners

 Grread is supplementary to classroom reading sessions and is additional to Shared Reading, Interactive Reading and Guided Reading.