Text+Talk

 Beck, I. L. & McKeown, M. G. (2001). Text talk: Capturing the benefits of read-aloud experiences for young children. //The Reading Teacher, 55//(1), 10-20. Retrieved June 21, 2009, from Academic Search Complete.


 * Quotes || Reaction ||
 * 1. "The goal of the project we describe here is to enhance young children's language and comprehension abilities through in-depth and extensive experience listening to and talking about stories read to them." (p. 10)

2. "The issue at hand is to discern what makes read-aloud experiences effective for enhancing children's language development." (p. 10)

3. "Texts that are effective for developing language and comprehension ability need to be conceptually challenging enough to require grappling with ideas and taking an active stance toward constructing meaning." (p. 10)

4. "Thus far a major point has been that several things children 'naturally' do in talking about a story - rely on the pictures and report their knowledge of things associated with the story - may stand in the way of their constructing meaning from story information." (p. 12)

5. "Our review of the research literature and our observation in classrooms motivated the development of Text Talk, which is an approach to read-alouds that is designed to enhance young children's ability to construct meaning from decontextualized language." (p. 13)

6. "Beyond building comprehension of the specific story, Text Talk attends to children's language development in two ways. One is that the kind of questions asked elicit greater language production. The other is that Text Talk takes advantage of some of the sophisticated vocabulary found in young children's trade books by explicitly teaching and encouraging use of several words from a story after the story has been read." (p. 13)

7. Text Talk focuses on a specific way to use the six main components of a read-aloud: selection of texts, initial questions, follow-up questions, pictures, background knowledge, and vocabulary.

8. "Our criteria for selecting texts were that they be intellectually challenging and provide the grist for children to explore ideas and to use language to explain ideas. In particular, in choosing stories we looked for some complexity of events, subtleties in expressing ideas, or presentation of unfamiliar ideas and topics." (p. 13-14)  9. "Yet simply asking more questions will not necessarily prompt richer comments. Thus a great deal of our emphasis in working with teachers as they implemented Text Talk was focused on how to follow up children's initial responses in productive ways." (p. 16)

10. "Because we wanted them to construct their idea from the text language, we did not show the picture until students had responded." (p. 16)

11. "Teachers helped children sort out the difference between simply responding from background knowledge and responding from story information. Children need help in bringing background knowledge to bear in appropriate ways, rather than simply tapping into tangential experiences. There is evidence that readers' elaborations of knowledge and experiences that are not integrally related to text information can disrupt the process of comprehension rather than enhance it (Strang, 1967; Trabasso & Suh, 1993)." (p. 17)

12. "The acquisition of vocabulary is an obvious focus for any program aiming to enhance children's literacy, because of the strong, well-documented relationship that vocabulary has to reading proficiency in particular and school achievement in general (Anderson & Freebody, 1981; Sternberg, 1987)." "Trade books are superb sources of vocabulary, and our Text Talk project takes advantage of this by explicitly emphasizing vocabulary." (p. 18) || 3. Children's auditory comprehension is greater than their reading comprehension, so it is important to choose texts that they could not read independently but will still benefit from.

4. I have not noticed this before when reading aloud to my students. I wonder if this is because I have taught mostly intermediate grades instead of younger children or because I have just not noticed.

7. Naming the six main components of a read-aloud provides teachers with a template for planning and conducting read-alouds.

10. I wonder how the authors feel about showing children the picture when reading nonfiction texts. Often, the pictures and photographs in nonfiction are integral to the text.

12. The authors offer suggestions for following through with the vocabulary instruction. I believe these would make the vocabulary instruction more effective since teaching words in isolation does not seem to work. ||  Tags: read-aloud, elementary school, anecdotal, reasons for reading aloud, choosing material , reading aloud effectively