Beck and McKeown

Beck and McKeown:  Text Talk

Important Points:

• The goal of text talk reading is to enhance young children’s language and comprehension ab9ilites through in depth and extensive experiences listening to and talking about stories read to them.
• Texts that are effective for developing language and comprehension ability need to be conceptually challenging enough to require grappling with ideas and taking an active stance toward constructing meaning.  Young children can handle challenging content.
• Vivid, delightful pictures are a hallmark of children’s trade books, and children are naturally drawn to them. However, if children rely on pictures to construct their understanding of a story, they may focus on characteristics of the pictures that interfere with constructing meaning of the story.
• Two types of interactions seemed to dominate: 1) directed toward clarifying some content or unfamiliar vocabulary; 2) attempts to involve children in the ongoing story by asking a question about what was just read.
• 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.

Key Steps:

* Choose a book whose text will be challenging for the readers and effective for developing language and comprehension ability.

* As you read the book to the students, read a few pages at one time without showing the pictures to the children. This will let the children make their inferences by listening to the text, not looking at the pictures. By the time they have seen the pictures; they make their assumptions by what the book said about the pictures.

* Ask them questions referring to what you have just read. Make sure the questions are open and require the students to describe and explain text ideas. If students rely with a one-word answer, try to make them elaborate on their answer.

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