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The Need for Narrative Read-alouds in an Info Text-Heavy World
Joe AnsonSpanish Fork Jr. HighCUWP Teacher [email protected]
Janae ShepherdCedar Ridge ElementaryCUWP Teacher [email protected]
UCTE ConferenceNovember 7, 2014
Writing Prompt
• “Something Neat” from Chris Crutcher’s King of the Mild Frontier
• Write about something “neat” you have been coerced into doing, or something “neat” you have been able to convince someone else to do.
Research
• Findings vary, depending on the study• Contributing teacher variables include– Pedagogical knowledge– Book selection– Quality of interactions around books– Developing vocabulary and inferential skills
Research (cont.)
• “Reading out loud is not just for the early school years. Students approaching the middle level encounter greater content material, and new and exciting vocabulary. Teachers whose voices are engaging will “hook” students into new subject matter. The teacher brings “life to text—a voice to a text” (Press, Henenberg, & Getman, 2009).
Research (cont.)
• “Teachers who implement interactive read-alouds in their classrooms tend to foster comprehension, promote independent thinking, and improve thinking through discussion (Bernardo & Dougherty, 2005). An interactive read-aloud (IRA) encourages the student to become an active participant in discussing the text” (Delacruz, 2103).
Research (cont.)
• “The way books are shared may open or close learning opportunities and possibilities to use language for an increasingly wider range of purposes. Skillful teachers can play a significant role in building, refining, and extending literacy knowledge, skills, and dispositions” (Lennox, 2013)
Importance of Story
“We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.”
--Jonathan Gottschall(The Storytelling Animal:
How Stories Make Us Human)
Human Communication
“[E]very writer…is the Prince of Stories. And I think any writer worth his or her salt gets to be the Prince of Stories, gets to be the Princess of Stories. We get to direct people; we get to give them waking dreams. We get to take them places, do magical things to their heads, and, with any luck, send them back to the day that they came from slightly changed, and not the person that they were when we got our hands on them and said, “I want to tell you a story.’”
- Neil GaimanOct 31, 2013
Reading and Writing Narratives
• Themes• Allusions• Connections
to the Collective Human Experience
2014 NCTE National Conference Theme:
Story as the Landscape of Knowing
• Stories saturate our lives, woven so tightly into the fabric of the everyday that it’s easy to overlook their value as a way of knowing the world. They are the glue that creates community and binds us together around common purposes and values.
• Sessions will explore the many dimensions of story as the landscape of knowing--story as literary and informational text, story as cross-disciplinary collaborations, story as multiple literacies and genres, story as memory and identity, story as teacher knowledge and research, story as community and culture, story as marginalization, and story as resistance.
You are the best reader in the room!
Be the example students want to follow.
Spark Their Interest!• Short, relatable, high-interest• Reluctant readers—series• Exposure to more genres• Anticipatory sets• Intro or companion to more complex text
“The only way to make the connection is to show them.” (Penny Kittle, Write Beside Them)
• Fluency• Cognitive strategies (Think aloud)
Make Connections
Text to World, Text to Self, Text to Text
Ask Questions What does this mean? What do I know about this? What is important?
Predict What is going to happen next?Visualize Make a movie in your head—picture it.
Monitor What didn’t make sense? What strategies am I using? Which should I use?
Mark Underlines, Stars, Question marks, Emoticons, Summaries, Questions, Drawings
Reflect Summarize. What happened? What’s important? What have I learned?
Figurative Language
The False Prince by Jennifer A. Neilsen
"Connor's dungeon smelled of rotting urine. I vaguely wondered who else had been brought here and how long ago. The dungeon was only a single room surrounded by rough-hewn rock walls and rusty iron bars. There were no windows and no lights except for the few lit candles in the sconces on the wall outside the bars. It was damp down here, and I shivered in the cold air. Except I wasn't cold. I was terrified.”
Figurative Language (cont.)The Lions of Little Rock by Kristen Levine
"The plane began to move, and I closed my eyes. I squeezed them tight, until I was silver stars on the the insides of my lids. I wasn't going to open them until this was all over and we were safely on the ground. Or until we were dead, smushed all over the concrete. I thought the second possibility was much more likely.
“But then, the plane gave a funny lurch, like nothing I had ever felt before, and without thinking, I opened my eyes.
“We were only a few feet off the ground, but the plane got higher quickly, rocking back and forth as it climbed. It was a gentle motion, not scary, like being in a cradle for grown-ups."
Vocabulary Development
“When teachers quality literary texts aloud, they tune students’ ears to complex syntax and new vocabulary and at the same time build students’ listening capacity and background knowledge of a genre and a topic as well as raise their word consciousness (Beck et al., 2013). The next step is to take teacher read-alouds beyond listening and enjoying literary texts to creating interactive read-aloud lessons that ask students to participate in word-building experiences that can enlarge vocabulary and related concepts and illustrate how figurative language impacts word meaning” (Cunningham, 2005; Fisher, Flood, Lapp, & Frey,
2004; Hoyt, 2013a, 2013b; Robb, 2013; Scott & Nagy, 2004).
Springboard into Learning
Using “Something Neat This Way Comes”• Isolated vocabulary: palomino, sphincter, reprieve,
claustrophobic, nanosecond• Word study: uninhabitable• Word meanings in situations: spawn• Unfamiliar terms: strip miner, heat register grate, oil furnace• Slang: bawlbaby• Allusions: Mandrake the Magician• Comparison/Contrast: misdemeanor vs. felony• Writing: connections, extending thoughts
“Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That’s how being eleven years old is.” (from “Eleven” by Sandra Cisneros)
Farting during an algebra test in seventh grade is like leaving your microphone on while you take a bathroom break, or like spilling the cafeteria’s meatloaf surprise all over the boss’s new white shirt and lucky tie, or like performing the world’s worst belly flop from the high dive and realizing, after you get out, that your shorts are still floating by the ladder because no matter what happens afterward, you will never live any of these incidents down.
Mentor Texts
Current Practices
• Buddy Reading: practice with a peer; discussion• Reading to Younger Grades: more practice without pressure• Monday Scribble: Personal connections, experiences,
extensions of thoughts through writing, solid foundation for beginning
• Class Novels• Personal Narratives• Storytelling Festival
Love of Literature!
References• Bernardo, P.J., & Dougherty, D.L. (2005). Teaching readers to think. ASCD Express, 1(2), 45-
47.• Crutcher, C. (2003). King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-advised Autobiography. New York:
Harper Tempest.• Delacruz, S. (2013). Using interactive read-alouds to increase K-2 students' reading
comprehension. Journal Of Reading Education, 38 (3), 21-27.• https://urbantimes.co/2013/10/the-importance-of-fairy-tales-today/• Lennox, S. (2013). Interactive read-alouds: An avenue for enhancing children's language for
thinking and understanding: A review of recent research. Early Childhood Education Journal, 41 (5), 381-389. doi:10.1007/s10643-013-0578-5
• Oczkus, Lori D. (2012). Best Ever Literacy Survival Tips: 72 Lessons You Can’t Teach Without. International Reading Association.
• Press, M., Henenberg, E., & German, D. (2009). Read alouds move to the middle level. Educator’s Voice, 11, 36-43.
• Robb, L. (2014). Vocabulary is Comprehension: Getting to the Root of Text Complexity. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Literacy.
• Serafini, F. & Giorgis, C. (2003). Reading Aloud and Beyond. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann
