I enjoyed this week's readings because they gave extremely useful information on read-alouds. Read alouds are without a doubt one of my favorite strategies to use. They are enjoyed by both students and teachers. Not only do they help students become better readers but also help develop oral language, which was the focus of the article Text Talk: Capturing the Benefits of Read-Aloud Experiences for Young Children. I favored this article over the chapter reading mainly because it focuses on the primary grades, which is the grade level I would like to teach.
Text talk, in my opinion, is a well developed strategy that makes the already good read aloud even better. It focuses more on getting students talking about the text in more than one word answers with the ultimate goal being that students will better comprehend the text as well as develop oral language and vocabulary skills. Teachers use open-ended questions and scaffold children's responses to their questions with hopes of probing students to talk about the topic. Something interesting about this strategy is that fact that some pictures are withheld from the students' view and are not shown until after students have given the answer the teacher is looking for. The idea is that students will not be able to answer the question by looking at the picture. Another interesting point is that teachers determine if students are responding to questions using background knowledge and if so, they help the student to seperate that knowledge from the story information.
The chapter gave many ideas for using read alouds and focused on using them in the content areas. I think this really helps to motivate students. I can remember my english teacher doing shared reading in my classes which exposed me to a lot more literature than I would have ever read on my own. Listening to him read was always fun because he made the books come alive, but, at the same time, we were still learning.
Two questions from this week's readings:
1. What exactly does the article mean by "decontextualized language"?
2. When it is not appropriate to use read alouds in content area classes?
Hi Abby,
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, nice post. I appreciate your questions about decontextualized language particularly, and from my perspective, when we ask children to learn language skills isolated from a context, or from a situation in which it makes sense (and hopefully is interesting and purposeful), we risk deadening learning into some sort of abstract why-I'm-I-doing-this sequence of tasks. Second, you write, "Teachers use open-ended questions and scaffold children's responses to their questions with hopes of probing students to talk about the topic," and I think this focus on questioning and how we question is probably one the most important things we as teachers can do for our students--give them room to take risks with their thinking, wrestling to find the words to elaborate on their thinking. Nice post, Abby. Dr B