Text Talk- Isabel L. Beck & Margaret G. McKeown

Key Concepts

• The goal is to enhance young children’s language and comprehension abilities through in depth and extensive experiences listening to and talking about stories read to them.
• Challenging content can be presenting to children through reading aloud
• Important to talk about the ideas in the book
• Children often rely on pictures for constructing meaning for the story
• Background Knowledge is very important in understanding a text, children will often respond based on this
• Choose the vocab work and talk about it, children must understand how it is used in the book to begin using in regularly.
• Enhancing children’s comprehension and language capabilities is essential for promoting literacy growth
• Pictures can draw attention away from processing the linguistic content in a text

Steps in Planning a Text Talk Lesson

1. Select a text
2. Develop questions
3. Try them out

*Get children to think about what going on in the story

* Give them opportunities to reflect

*Focus discussion on major story ideas

*Contrast ideas at the end of the story

*Involve the children in discussion while reading the story

* Pictures must be shown after, so the child can imagine the story first

*Select a book that is intellectually challenging

*Repeat and rephrase what the children say

*Allow time for follow up questions

*Make sure to show pictures after the child has had time to respond

Flanigan (2005) Assignment

1. What role does finger pointing play in developing concept of word and phonemic awareness?

-          Finger pointing helps children recognize words rather than memorize them and skim through the lines.  This also can help children sound out the words while they are saying them.  This can help the children break down the process and really learn the words.  Finger pointing builds phonemic awareness because it helps the children hear all of the sounds in the word, which then helps them to say the word.  The steps of this consist of repetition and first, then the children learn the first letter to the word, then they learn the ending of the word, then finally they learn the vowels of the word.  Once the child has completed all of these steps (especially learning the nouns) they have phonemic awareness.

1. Describe the 4-stage model of early literacy.

-          The first stage is beginning constant knowledge, the second stage is gaining the concept of words in text, the third stage is the ability to segment phonemes, and finally the fourth stage is recognizing the words.

1. Describe what this means: “It is not in the telling, but it is in the very act of reading that Jack will actually learn how to read.” p. 10

-Jack will only learn how to read by actually doing it.  He needs to practice sounding out the words and understanding them.  It will not help to teach thing just to work with him until he understands what is going on rather than just memorizing things.

1. What instruction helps develop beginning readers’ awareness of words and phonemes?

-Reading stories with them and helping them sound out the words is best for beginning readers.  Having them tell us which sounds are in the words and helping them sound it out is the best way to go.  Page 43, 44, and 45 states that some way to help the children’s awareness of words and phoenemes can be achieved through reading aloud, model finger-point reading of familiar texts, choral reading, partner reading, echo reading, buddy reading, cut- up reading, and more! Their are clearly many types of reading we can do with the children to get them comfortable with words, I think these are great methods to obide by!

Robbins and Ehri (1994) Assignment

1. Children increase their vocabularies by listening to stories read aloud.  Also they can learn vocab incidentally through conversations and TV.  “Studies by Jenkins, Stein, and Wysocki (1984); Nagy, Anderson, and Herman (1987); and Nagy, Herman, and Anderson (1985) have indicated that children do learn vocabulary incidentally from texts during Grades 3-8.” Cited from the article page 55.

1. There were lots of studies done that reading aloud helped children vocabulary increase, especially the ones who started out with a higher vocab.  Being read to twice helps the children pick up on words, if they hear the words 4 times its even better.
2. The books we read to children should include familiar words and unfamiliar words.  The books should have meaning that goes with the vocab words.  Read aloud books should have a richness of language that can really teach the children because they whole point of reading them the book is to improve their language understanding.  The books should be interesting so that the children stay intrigued in the story and stays involved the whole time they are being read to.
3. I would emphasize the meaning of words when it comes to teaching vocab to my students.  Also relating those words to the books we have read in class. It is important to pick out key words in the books that the children should learn throughout the readings.  Reading these books will help the children understand the words more and more as the grown familiar with the words.
4. Reading to students will play a big role in our teaching because it is something we will do a lot for many different reasons.  It can help children with vocab along with many other things, therefore it will happen a lot!