Table of Contents
Reading aloud helps children to learn new words, learn more about the world, learn about written language, and see the connection between words that are spoken and words that are written.
Dialogical Reading is A systematic way to engage children in conversation about text to build language, vocabulary, & comprehension. The teacher works with a small group of children to engage in conversation about images and text. You can focus emergent literacy or any other early literacy outcome. The goal is to focus on the shape and summary of the story through student directed dialogue and focused questioning techniques combined with targeted vocabulary instruction.
Dialogical reading allows us to meet many objectives derived from these standards. Firs by reading with the children through conversation you build language skills, fluency, & vocabulary. Dialogical reading requires a teacher and a group of students to engage in cognitively challenging talk about text.
Dialogical reading also relies upon multiple Repeated readings of text. Many students in preschool can pretend to read their favorite book from memory. We push both this passion and practice through dialogical reading. As you re-read a text you add additional complexity in your questioning techniques.
This method can also build disciplinary literacy skills. Dialogical reading allows students to engage in the act of inquiry with non fiction in the content area. They can play at being in different STEM rules Students build the word & world knowledge they need through oral language development while you model reading, book skills, and metacognitive think alouds.
Dialogical reading allows students to practice how they think. You can call it Building critical thinking skills, computational skills, or just thinking. By having a specific questioning methodology the different levels scaffold students into more complex learning.
The Standards
L.48.13 Demonstrate comprehension through retelling with use of pictures and props, acting out main events or sharing information learned from nonfiction text.
L.48.14 Ask and answer simple who, what, where and why questions related to story or text
L.48.15 Make predictions and/or ask questions about the text by examining the title, cover, picture
L.60.12 With prompting and support, retell familiar stories, including story elements (e.g., setting, characters, events) and/or share key details from informational text.
L.60.13 Identify main components of a story or text (the major plot points of a story or the main topic of an informational text)
L.60.14 Use connections between self and character, experience and emotions to increase comprehension
RF.K.1 Demonstrate understanding of the organization and basic features of print.
R.CCR.1 Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.
Method
Select the text.You choose a text based on you topic or learning goal. The pages should be visually rich. Do not worry about ease of decoding but do not choose overly complex sentence structures.
Begin by practicing reading to small groups ten minutes a day. Take a walk through the texct. You do not even have to read it. Just have students explain what is going on in the book. Take turns and have fun. Ask students to explain what other students are doing or notice what other studens are doing.
Questioning Sequence
Use the PEER method to ask questions
Prompt the child to notice objects & note elements of the text Evaluate the child’s response Expand the child’s response by repeating & adding information to it Repeat the prompt, or encourage the child to repeat the expanded information
As you read and ask questions use the following pattern in your dialogue with students. It should not follow a Question, response, affirmation pattern. You extend the dialogue.
Questioning Levels
1.Encourage children to label objects in pictures 2. Help children talk about what’s happening in the story 3. Ask children to make connections between the story & their personal experiences
Questioning Prompts
C - Completion prompts (level 1) R - Recall prompts (level 3) O - Open-ended prompts (level 2) W - What, when, why, where, how (level 1 & 2) D - Distancing prompts (level 3)