Week 5 - Widzinski (response)

In agreement with Holly, in my K class, my MT facilitates a lot of the discussion. She will tend to call on the students that she knows will have "good" meaningful responses. My class also rarely does read-alouds or anything of the sort. If my MT reads a book outloud, it is in response to something the children are learning about. For example, they were talking about how things are different between the past and now, so she read a book outloud talking about how in the past, people may have gone to school by horse and buggy, today we walk or take the bus, etc. To me, this book is not interesting and does not evoke much discussion.

In reading Beck and McKeown's article on Text Talk, it showed some very interesting things. First, I didn't really realize that simply doing read-alouds weren't really benefiting young children; yes I knew there had to be more to it, but when they gave examples of children's responses, I realized how closed off children's responses to books can be.  This idea of "text talk" is something that I want to implement in my classroom, granted I am teaching K-1. As Holly, Julia and I are all child development majors, I believe this is an alternative way to promote awesome literary discussions with young children. The biggest thing that I found in this article, which I agree with completely was the point about pictures: show the students the picture on the page after the question and response has been given for that selected part of the text. This limits the children to only answering about the picture, but to really thinking about the words that were just read before looking at the picture.

Text talk uses specific texts that are complex that can be used for young children to build meaning from. Be careful with the vocabulary in the text, or else we can get too hung up on defining the words for our students rather than focus on the literary context. There needs to be initial questions that have your students explain text ideas, not recall words from the text. The follow-up questions need to be scaffolded from the students initial responses (from the initial questions).  These follow-up questions will encourage elaboration of an initial idea. As teachers, we also need to be cautious of the background knowledge we want our students to bring in; too far fetched and it could be pointless material they're bringing to the discussion. Teachers should help scaffold the background knowledge around the issues in the text to build meaning off of them.

Text talk isn't all that different from some of the strategies that we've been learning, but by tying all aspects of this method together will provide a great literary discussion tool for young children.