For 6 years, I was an Elementary Literacy Support Educator at Aregorogeng Primary School (the school’s name is a pseudonym) in South Africa. There, I assisted students who had learning difficulties as well as teachers who had problems teaching these students in their classroom from Foundation Phase (FP) (grades R-3) through Intermediate Phase (grades 4–7). The school enrolled 1549 student in grades R-7. There were 58 teachers who were all highly qualified in their respective subjects. The school taught in three native languages: 77% was Sepedi, 24% was XiTsonga and 9% IsiZulu. According to South African educational system policy for FP, students were taught in their native language. English was introduced from second grade as a subject. But when students entered in Intermediate Phase, they switched from their native language and English became the medium of instruction in all content areas.

Literacy instruction was allocated 40% during the FP. Within this time, teachers were expected to teach the foundation strategies that would assist students to understand their reading text and provide students with a variety of reading, speaking and writing opportunities in all content areas. Whereas in the Intermediate Phase students were expected to use strategies learnt in the FP and integrate them in a variety of reading texts for a different reasons such as summarising, predicting, questioning, interpreting and searching for information (South African Department of Education 2003). The South African Department of Education’ Systemic Evaluation results for 2007 indicated that the average achievement of third graders’ reading comprehension skills was 36%. So, Aregorogeng Primary School assigned a baseline assessment to grades 3–6 to assess their reading literacy, and the results found that 540 students from those grades have been determined to be at risk in their reading, speaking and writing performance.

As an Elementary Literacy Support Educator teacher, I first met with the literacy specialist to further discuss these data and possible instructional solutions. Later, I met the Head of Department (HoD) for the FP and four third-grade teachers to address the literacy needs of the their student population, including being exposed to a diversity of reading materials at an early age in order to be good readers (South African Department of Education 2003; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [NICHD] 2000).

The literacy specialist, HoD and myself thought of the reading principles that stated that teachers need to build their reading instruction from student’s background and teach the individual to read and write independently (Heilman, Blair & Rupley 2002). According to these principles, teachers need to work hard on planning and structuring their classrooms, develop reading instruction and activities to model and collaborate and provide more opportunities for students every day. Teachers also need to expose students to different-levelled books and cultural books in their classroom in order to become independent readers (Heilman et al. 2002). Furthermore, the South African Teacher’s Handbook (2007:54) for teaching reading in the early grades reported that to promote literacy in classrooms, literacy specialists and support educators can ‘build groups of teachers at a cluster level who have acquired strong instructional knowledge in reading, provide coach and model effective reading strategies’. Therefore, the goal of this literacy leadership project was to provide support to select third-grade teachers of how to differentiate the reading instruction in their classroom that would help students increase their vocabulary and reading comprehension.

An invitation went out to all third-grade teachers at the Aregorogeng Primary School. During the group discussion meeting, teachers were advised to practice effective strategies everyday with students to help increase students’ reading skills that would make them independent readers. However, a third-grade teacher raised this question based on her overcrowded classroom: How do I schedule effective reading instruction daily in order to engage, motivate, and increase students’ reading in this situation?’ This question led me to implement the Guided Reading approach, which was suggested by the literacy specialist.

Research on Guided Reading (Fountas & Pinnell 1996) found that the approach could provide teachers and students with more reading opportunities in the classroom that would help students become independent readers. It was also an element already adapted by most of the South African literacy programmes such as Literacy Learning Program for FP and Languages Learning Program for Intermediate Phase. Secondly, Guided Reading has a variety of teaching strategies that can be used by any teacher to increase students’ vocabulary and comprehension skills, which was the main focus of this literacy leadership project. Thirdly, students at third-grade were about to switch their native language instruction into English and it was necessary for them to be prepared to transfer the first learned language reading instruction skills into the process of reading instruction of their second language (English) at their early stage (Avalos et al. 2007). Finally, Fountas & Pinnell (1996:21) identified Guided Reading as the most ‘essential component of balanced literacy program’ in which teachers support the students’ learning by teaching strategies for processing text by allowing any teacher to differentiate instruction in order to meet the diverse needs of all age readers and comprehension strategies in the classroom through whole-group, small-group and individual activities. Students can work in small groups with the help of their teacher for 3–5 days per week for between 10 and 30 minutes in order to develop phonemic awareness, phonetic awareness, vocabulary, reading comprehension and fluency. To achieve this, a teacher models reading instruction to students on how to read, think, summarise or ask questions while the students can be encouraged to write their own stories and talk about them to other members of the groups. A teacher keeps on directing and supporting students with understanding difficult words or texts by building on the students’ prior knowledge, discussing and revisiting the text or supporting the process through strategies based on students’ mistakes. During Guided Reading, students can have an understanding of reading the text before, during and after the comprehension passage that can enable teachers to extend students’ vocabulary development, knowledge and use of comprehension strategies (Fountas & Pinnell 1996; Pressely 2000).

This 8-month project included a professional development workshop, teacher discussion group and direct classroom observation. Four FP teachers volunteered to participate. The reading specialist and I introduced to these teachers core literacy teaching knowledge. I also went to the school library to checkout children’s levelled books and I found out that the library did not have enough books for participating students. So I made enough copies of all the checked out books.

At our all-day professional development workshop, we taught the teachers the Guided Reading approach. Fountas and Pinnell (1996:4) suggested that teachers need to gain knowledge before for how to use the approach; therefore, in the group discussion we learnt that during Guided Reading:

(a) a teacher works with a small group; (b) children in the group are similar in their development of reading process and are able to read about the same level of text; (c) teachers introduce stories and assist children’s reading in ways that help to develop independent reading strategies; (d) each child reads the whole text; (e) the emphasis is on reading increasingly challenging books over time, and (f) children are grouped and regrouped in a dynamic process that involves ongoing observation of meaning overrides.

We also reviewed a survey study about how to create these students’ groups. It was suggested that successful teachers group students by four to six per group (Ford & Opitz 2008).

All the original books I checked out from library were displayed on the tables at the front of the classroom together with the copies I made for each class. Teachers were advised to select and group them according to their students’ reading levels. Fountas and Pinnell (1996) stated that teachers need to keep students engaged by selecting students’ level books, modelling reading instruction during the process and continually observing, assessing and recording all individuals’ progress. Therefore, I modelled all workshops’ activities by selecting one common children’s levelled book entitled ‘Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters’ by John Steptoe (1993). The book was selected because its story content related to students’ environment and their culture, which I thought would help students’ to better understand the context of the story, activities and instruction much easier.

Story Summary: Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters is an African tale. The two daughters were beautiful. Nyasha was beautiful inside and outside, meaning she was kind, caring and nice to every living thing, but the sister Manyara was beautiful outside only. She was mean, aggressive and angry all the time. Her intention was to be a queen and turn her sister Nyasha into her slave servant. One day a king invited all beautiful daughters from all the land to come before him so that he could choose a wife. On their way to the king’s palace, the king presented himself to Manyara as a snake, a hungry dirty child and an old woman. Manyara behaved strangely towards them all. To Nyasha the king presented his kingdom, and she became the king’s wife.

Books should be relevant to students’ needs, challenging, familiar, and have to teach students certain strategies that could be applied in other content areas (Heilman et al. 2002).

I provided each teacher with a copy of the workshop’s lesson plan so that they could follow all the activities that I would be doing. Because the selected book was big, at each group’s table there were three copies, which meant that two students were sharing one copy. The lesson plan’s activities were designed according to the three group levels accommodated in the classrooms. Using real students from one of the participating teachers’ classrooms, I modelled how to introduce a new book by holding it up and asking questions about the cover. I walked through the book pages showing pictures as we predicted the story. At the back of the classroom, there was a chart of the map of Africa, and then I modelled to teachers how I could integrate the text with other content areas (i.e. location of the country where the story was taking place). Then I read aloud to them, requesting them to find new words and circle each word that was repeatedly used in the book. As the third step, I stopped and modelled how to ask questions from the story to see if the students understood. I also modelled using the new words identified page by page to summarise the story. At times, I stopped and modelled how to break words into simple parts. To make connections to all these reading areas – read aloud, vocabulary, comprehension – there were a variety of activities for all three groups because of the different reading abilities. Participants were given opportunities of rereading the story as a group, individually and in pairs and later I used the activity of finding the definitions of the new words identified by using the dictionary on each table. For comprehension, I asked one group to summarise the story and another group to discuss the relationship between ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters’ stories. As the last part of the workshop’s lesson, students were given the opportunity for choosing the activity of their interest such as drawing and painting any facial expression on the mask, drawing a beautiful wedding dress for Nyasha or creating a wedding invitation card to any family or friends. From their interest activities, students were asked to write their own sentences or stories about their art which will be discussed at the end. But I first modelled drawing a picture on a chalkboard and then wrote a few sentences about it. While they were still busy, I also modelled how to provide support to struggling students by chunking and decoding large words by making students understand the sounds of letters represented, creating words and then reading aloud the new words. Teachers’ feedback of the workshop was very positive.

Based on observations and teacher conferences, I learnt that factors such as insufficient amount of levelled reading materials, inappropriate levelled reading materials, limited time highlighted by teachers and large classroom size played a role in limiting students from increasing their reading skills. These factors were also found in one recent research conducted in South Africa that evaluated Guided Reading in three primary schools in Western Cape (Kruizinga & Nathanson 2010). The study found that teachers have neither adequate levelled reading materials to practice Guided Reading nor clear policy documents providing clarifications about the strategies to implement Guided Reading in their classrooms.

In all levelled reading materials used, teachers continued making reading copies for the entire process of the project and some of the books were even borrowed from lower grades to make this an effective project. Teachers also had trouble matching students’ level books with their students because of a lack of training in using assessment tools. They wanted to learn more about reading strategies for the primary classroom. Teachers also had difficulty differentiating Guided Reading activities in their classrooms because of the physical, space, especially in two Sepedi classrooms where tables occupied so much space.

Because the main instruction in the FP was in students’ native language in all content learning areas and English was taught as a subject for 35 minutes three times in a week, I found that not enough time was devoted for Guided Reading to increase students’ reading in large classrooms, especially in English as a foreign language. I found that in smaller classrooms like IsiZulu and Xitsonga, students’ participation in group discussion was much easier to be handled by teachers than in the other two large classes for Sepedi. The group discussions also improved oral language proficiency. Therefore, it is suggested that the South African Department of Basic Education needs to revisit time allocation for additional languages in schools, especially English which is considered as an international communicative language.