Beck and McKeown: Text Talk

“Text Talk: Capturing the benefits of read aloud experiences for young children”

Important Points

• Children are not able to read challenging text on their own so read-aloud stories are the best venue to introduce challenging vocabulary that they need to hear.
• Keys to literacy growth include “talk surrounding the text” and “getting children to think about what was going on in the story”.
• Involve children in the stories and allow them to be reflective and discuss major story ideas.
• If students rely on the pictures in the story rather than the text, their prior knowledge and experiences will lead them to infer things in the story that may not be there.

Key Steps to Planning and Performing a Text Talk Lesson Plan

Texts:

• Choose a text that exhibits an event structure rather than a series of situations
• Choose a text that does not rely to heavily on pictures but rather linguistic content.

Initial Questions:

• Do not ask constraining questions that do not allow the students to explore their own ideas and experiences

Follow up Questions:

• Repeat and rephrase what the students say to extend their responses and encourage more elaborated responses.
• You can also use generic prompts to get them to expand on their thoughts (i.e. “what’s that mean?”)

Pictures:

• Ask for input on the story before showing them the illustration that goes along with it.  Teachers need to show pictures judiciously.

Background Knowledge:

• Children need help in knowing when bring background knowledge up is appropriate.  Teachers need to guide the background information and help the students make sense of the story at hand and how their background knowledge may play a role.

Vocabulary:

• Pick one or two words to focus on when reading a story and teach them directly after completing the reading.  Use the context it was used in, in the text to help the student understand its meaning.  It is important to have students recognize hearing the word in other context and to use it themselves so that it will eventually become part of their repertoire.

Advertisement