The Need for Narrative Read-alouds
in an Info Text-Heavy World
UCTE Conference
November 7, 2014
Joe Anson
Spanish Fork Jr. High
CUWP Teacher Consultant
joeaveragewriter@gmail.com
Janae Shepherd
Cedar Ridge Elementary
CUWP Teacher Consultant
janae@nowwehave7.com
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 readalouds 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 Gaiman
Oct 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.
Be the example students want to follow.
Spark Their Interest!
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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
Text to World, Text to Self, Text to Text
Connections
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
Mark
Reflect
What didn’t make sense? What strategies am I using? Which
should I use?
Underlines, Stars, Question marks, Emoticons, Summaries,
Questions, Drawings
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 wordbuilding 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
Mentor Texts
“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.
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
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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