Text Talk Article

Overall I enjoyed reading the Text Talk article and found it to be very helpful for my future. Some key points that I found within the article are:

• It is important for us as teachers to know that students can handle challenging books and we need to find those books that are effective for helping our students develop language and comprehension skills.
• Reading aloud to students is necessary to give the learners decontextualized language experience. This kind of learning helps students to understand beyond the pictures and dig deeper into the actual text of the story. Students need to use their knowledge as well as the facts just learned from the aloud reading to reflect on the story and be able to answer questions beyond just “What color was the girl’s hair?” When asking a question such as that the students do not need to listen to the story itself but rather can just look at the pictures in order to find the answer. This is something that the article recognizes, that student’s tend to base answers off of the pictures and when the pictures are later shown it forces the students to use the decontextualized language and go beyond what they visibly see.
• It is important for a teacher to interact during read-alouds. The teacher needs to show the pictures after reading the page’s text rather than letting the listeners be watchers. The teacher should pay attention to key points of the story and ask the students what is going on and after the correct response the picture can be shown. It was noted in the article that sometimes a teacher may have to make several attempts for a class to get the point of the story because the kids focus on maybe the picture on the cover rather than listening to the plot. This kind of somewhat battle to get the kids to listen to the text will be difficult but Text Talk helps us to find ways to reroute the students responses in a positive way so that they may be able to use what they heard to understand what is going on in the story.

The Key Steps in Planning and Performing a Text Talk Lesson:

• The teacher should first find a book that is challenging enough to use teacher interactions during the read-alouds.
• Then the teacher should read the title of the book to the class and ask them what they think the book is about. Then the teacher can show the class the book’s cover while proceeding to read the first pages of the book. It is important for the teacher to hold the pictures being shown until after the main point of the story is clarified.
• After the beginning of the book is read the teacher should ask the class what is going on? This will force the students to use what they just heard about the story to use their own words to describe what is going on.
• The teacher should proceed through the book in this way making sure to have follow-up questions and to interact when vocabulary words are read or an unfamiliar saying is read to make sure that the students are understanding everything. It too is important to not interject too much or else the student’s attention to the story will be lost.
• After the story is read the students should then be able to summarize what went on just because they payed so close attention to the text of the story rather than the pictures.

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