How to Craft High Quality Guided Reading Questions

Guided reading is one of the most popular lesson formats for English teachers, helping students not only improve their reading abilities but also develop critical thinking and language skills. But crafting the right questions to spark curiosity and deep discussion can be a bit tricky! The right questions can transform a simple reading session into an engaging, thought-provoking experience that drives learning forward.

Let’s explore how to craft high-quality guided reading questions that will stretch your students to explore stories in depth while developing their English language skills. Plus, we’ll introduce you to Abridge Academy’s new guided reading teaching materials – designed to provide you with everything you need for more interactive and engaging online ESL classes themed around stories!

Why are questions important for guided reading?

Guided reading lessons typically focus on a story or non-fiction text. However, rather than just passively reading, instead students are challenged with deeper questions and follow-up activities to further develop their language skills.

Simple questions focusing on comprehension of the text can help check understanding and boost confidence. Additionally, you can use high quality questions to guide students to infer the meaning of new words or grammatical structures in the text. Finally, more advanced questions help stretch students to analyse beyond the story, for example considering character motivations or predicting what might happen next.

High quality questions also help boost students enjoyment and engagement in reading. Teachers can link the story to wider societal contexts or students’ own lives, as well as to other school subject areas or interests. This helps encourage active participation and foster a love for reading outside the classroom too.

How can you improve the quality of questions during class?

Here are some quick tips to help improve your guided reading questions:

Use open-ended questions: Encourage deeper thinking and discussion by avoiding yes/no questions. For example, instead of asking “Did the character feel happy?” ask “How did the character feel?”
Vary question types: Mix up comprehension, inferential, and opinion-based questions to keep students engaged and develop a wider range of skills.
Focus on key themes: Tailor questions to the themes and big ideas in the text, helping students make connections to the broader lesson objectives.
Be clear and concise: Make sure questions are easy to understand, especially for ESL learners. Avoid overly complex phrasing that may confuse them. For example, rather than “Do you think he could have done something different?” ask “What could he have done differently?”
Encourage student-led inquiry: Allow students to come up with their own questions about the story, which promotes ownership of their learning. This is particularly effective in group class activities.

What questions can you ask during guided reading?

Let’s click through the slides to explore the different types of questions you could ask in more depth:

Comprehension checking questions

Comprehension checking questions (CCQs) are often the easiest to craft and answer. These pick out simple factual information from the text, asking students to summarise in their own words. For example:

What is the title of the story?
What happened at the beginning of the story?
What did the first little pig build his house with?
Which animal ran the fastest?
Who was Little Red Riding Hood going to visit?
What can you see in the picture?

These questions are best asked throughout or immediately after the first reading of the story. This helps highlight key information and build confidence following the plotline.

Critical thinking and inferential questions

These questions encourage students to think beyond the text or images and make logical inferences, thus developing critical thinking skills. Examples include:

What do you think will happen next?
How does the rainy weather affect the mood?
Why do you think Goldilocks snuck into the three bears’ house?
How do you think the Ugly Duckling felt?
Why do you think the author chose the word “huge” instead of “very big”?
What does the grasshopper’s response tell you about his personality?

Consider following up each question with “Why do you think that?” or “What evidence is there in the text to support this?” to stretch students to explain their reasoning in more detail.

Vocabulary and language questions

A key goal for many ESL students in guided reading classes is to improve their vocabulary base and expose themselves to a wider range of sentence structures or grammatical forms. While reading stories, you can encourage this with questions like:

What do you think the word ‘determined’ means in this sentence? Can you think of another word that could be used here instead?
What part of speech is this word? Is it a verb (doing / being word) or a noun (thing, place or person)? How do you know?
Which character did the action in this sentence? How could you re-write this sentence with the character’s name at the start? What is the difference between these active and passive sentence structures?

These questions also develop useful skills such as being able to infer meaning from context. This is particularly important for ESL students, who may feel quite daunted by unfamiliar words in texts.

Opinion and personal connection questions

It is also important to encourage students to describe their own opinions or ideas around a story, linking them to their own lives. Consider asking questions such as:

Do you agree with the character’s decision? Why / why not?
What would you do if you found Goldilocks in your bed?
What could you say to the ugly duckling to help him feel more confident?
What is the moral of the story? How can you learn from this in your own life?
Have you ever lost a race too? How did it make you feel? What did you learn from this experience? What would you do differently next time?

These kind of questions can also be great starting points for more extended activities, such as writing a review or coming up with an alternative story ending.

Asking a variety of high quality questions across these four question types is key to stretching students’ learning in guided reading lessons, fostering a deeper understanding and developing their language skills.

Start teaching your best online guided reading lessons today!

Do your students love reading cute stories and having fun in class, but you’re struggling to find suitable books for their level or link stories to measurable learning outcomes? Maybe you want to stretch their creativity a bit, helping them tell their own stories?

Take the stress out of finding high quality guided reading materials adapted for ESL students with Abridge Academy’s pre-made guided reading lessons! Our ever-expanding library includes everything you need to teach engaging, fun and interactive online ESL classes, including:

📚 Levelled reading lessons based around traditional fairy tales and fables.
📝 Creative and narrative writing lessons to develop storytelling skills.
🎁 100s of printable worksheets, flashcards, certificates and creative projects.

Designed specifically for ESL students, these lessons are fun and engaging, link directly to language learning objectives, and are packed full of interactive activities! They can be used as stand-alone lessons, added in to supplement your core curriculum lessons, or taught as a full guided reading or creative writing course. Get started for free today →