Text Talk

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Text Talk

• Beck McKeown (2001)

Image courtesy of http//hill.troy.k12.mi.us/staff
/bnewingham/myweb3/Clipart/read20aloud.gif
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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.

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Why Read Aloud Children? Contd

• 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.

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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

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• 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.

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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.

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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 cant yet read the books that
  are read aloud to them.

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• In Text Talk, pictures are shown after children
  have constructed meaning from what has been read.
  
• When background knowledge is elicited, the
  teacher scaffolds childrens 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.

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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

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Text Talk questions elicit rich language from
students.
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Poorly done read-alouds elicit one-word
responses.
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Asking Follow-up Questions

• Teachers should take cues from childrens 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 childrens 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.

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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.

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Background Knowledge

• Acknowledge a students 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 lets think about what the story told us
  about George, the zoo-bound monkey).

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Vocabulary

• Teach Tier 2 wordswords 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.