Text Talk

1. Text Talk Beck & McKeown (2001) Image courtesy of http://hill.troy.k12.mi.us/staff/bnewingham/myweb3/Clipart/read%20aloud.gif

2. Why Read Aloud Children? • Students need to grapple with ideas; • They need to be actively involved in the construction of meaning; • Young children can handle challenging content • Because their listening comprehension is better than their reading comprehension, we can read aloud to them books with challenging and rich language.

3. Why Read Aloud Children? Cont’d • Some children come from low-literacy homes; Hart and Risley found an annual difference of about 30-million words in the daily conversations of welfare families and professional families directed at young children. • Children experience decontextualized language; they have to make sense of ideas that are beyond the here and now. • Quality talk around books promotes familiarity with rare words and syntactic structures. • Talk around the text or getting children to think about what was going on in the story are keys to literacy growth.

4. How is Text Talk Different from Ordinary Read Aloud? • The most effective talk involves encouraging children to focus on important story ideas and giving them opportunities to reflect rather than expecting a quickly retrieved answer. We want children to focus on major story ideas. • Students are likely to ignore the text if shown pictures and allowed to dwell on their prior knowledge. • Meaning should come from the story and should not be drowned out by the pictures and students’ prior knowledge. • Pictures should be shown only after the talk around the text has taken place. • Children need to construct meaning from the decontextualized language of the story not the pictures. sd

5. Read-aloud is most effective when: • Discussion is focused on major story ideas • Ideas are dealt with as they are encountered in contrast to after the entire story has been read; • Children are involved in the discussion with opportunities to be reflective.

6. Common Read-Aloud Strategies • Prevalence of responding on the basis of pictures • Socrates needs glasses. • Pictures closely represent what children are accustomed to encountering the world around them. • Prevalence of responding on the basis of background knowledge. Children tend to respond to questions from background knowledge alone and ignore what had just been read to them from the story. Children tend to report on their own experiences because they can more readily derive information from them in comparison to text language. Curious George likes bananas. Teachers’ questions were invoked only brief answers about a detail.

7. More About Text Talk • Text Talk interactions are based on open questions that the teacher poses during reading that ask children to consider the ideas in the story and talk about and connect them as the story moves along. • Text Talk was inspired by the Beck and colleagues’ Questioning the Author work. • Questioning the Author focuses on texts ideas and encourages students to construct meaning from those ideas as they are reading. • Questioning the Author was designed for intermediate-grade students unlike Text Talk which is geared toward kindergarteners and first-graders who can’t yet read the books that are read aloud to them.

8. In Text Talk, pictures are shown after children have constructed meaning from what has been read. • When background knowledge is elicited, the teacher scaffolds children’s responses to make clear the relationship of background knowledge to text ideas. • Text Talk supports language development in two ways: (a) by eliciting greater language production than one-word answers using open-ended and analytical questions and (b) by teaching sophisticated (Tier 2) words.

9. Choose texts for Text Talk that have • Complexity of events: texts should provide extended, connected content for building meaning not a series of unconnected situations or facts. • Subtleties in expressing ideas • Presentation of unfamiliar ideas and topics

10. Text Talk questions elicit rich language from students.

11. Poorly done read-alouds elicit one-word responses.

12. Asking Follow-up Questions • Teachers should take cues from children’s initial responses and build on them by asking thoughtful follow-up questions. • To follow up on initial (sparse) responses, repeat and rephrase what children say. Incorporating previous student responses into subsequent questions seems to have a strong positive effect. • Ask generic probes that prompt children to explain “what is that all about?” as another approach to following up children’s initial responses. • Or reread the relevant portion of the text and repeat the initial question. This helps students focus on the text language as the source for their answer.

13. When to Show Pictures • There are two instances when demonstration of pictures should be especially delayed until after Text Talk has taken place about the current segment of text. • When pictures mirror the linguistic content of a text: Children will not use the linguistic content to build meaning but instead rely on pictures to do so. • When the content of pictures is in conflict with what is going on in the text. The vividness of pictures could lead children to misunderstand what is happening in the story at that point. • Children will come to understand the expectations regarding the showing of pictures and will become more attentive to the linguistic content as they are listening. • Show pictures judiciously, often after some event or idea has been explained linguistically. • Attending to text content is a major feature that prepares students to be successful readers. Having them listen to the text content helps them with language comprehension.

14. Background Knowledge • Acknowledge a student’s comment tangentially related to the story content (derived from background knowledge), but point out the distinctions between his/her experiences and the story. You can say “yes, monkeys like bananas, but let’s think about what the story told us about George, the zoo-bound monkey).”

15. Vocabulary • Teach Tier 2 words—words that are likely to be unfamiliar to children but denote concepts that children can identify with and use in normal conversation. • Highlight 2-4 words per story.