Read-alouds that develop
vocabulary and comprehension
Keys to increasing explicitness
Sharon Walpole
University of Delaware
Explicitness
Emphasis on explaining the cognitive procedures
necessary to complete a task.
Modeling
Scaffolding
Assessment
Read Alouds Can Build
Knowledge
Of the world
Of language
Of words
Of text structure
Of comprehension strategies
Conceptual Model:
Gradual Release of Responsibility*
All Teacher
Teacher +
Students
*Pearson,
All Students
P.D., & Gallagher, M.C. (1983). The instruction of reading comprehension.
Contemporary Educational Psychology, 8, 317-344.
“[R]esearch has almost universally
supported the idea that reading
aloud to children leads to improved
reading comprehension.” (p. 144)
Smolkin & Donovan, 2002
These children are ready to acquire
comprehension strategies, but they
tend not to be proficient decoders.
So, what’s a teacher to do?
The Domino Theory
Teach children to decode first, and put
off vocabulary and comprehension
instruction until later.
“If we want children to reason their
ways through texts during a time
when they cannot yet read, then the
social context for comprehension
acquisition must be a read-aloud of
text.” (p. 144)
Smolkin & Donovan, 2002.
What kind of read-alouds
shall we have?
Two Types of Read-Alouds
1. Teacher Directed
 Planned with carefully placed questions
 IRE model employed
2. Fully Interactive Model
 Planned questions may be modified
 Teacher embeds commentary
 Flexible scaffolding provided
 Students collaboratively support one
another
“The Five-to-Seven Shift”
During this age range, children
become able to think “multidimensionally,” a requirement of
comprehension, and to reason
with others in group settings.
This argues for fully interactive
read-alouds!
Interactive read-alouds tend to
work best with information books.
– Smolkin & Donovan, 2002
In a nonfiction interactive read-aloud,
a teacher can . . .
 Link a word to its context
 Help children infer causal relationships
 Tell about how texts are structured
 Model the use of fix-up strategies
Smolkin & Donovan, 2002
In a nonfiction interactive read-aloud,
a teacher can . . .
 Link a word to its context
 Help children infer causal relationships
 Tell about how texts are structured
 Model the use of fix-up strategies
Smolkin & Donovan, 2002
T:
C:
T:
C:
C:
T:
C:
“In 1612, French explorers saw some Iroquois people
popping corn in clay pots. They would fill the pots
with hot sand, throw in some popcorn and stir it with a
stick. When the corn popped, it came to the top of the
sand and made it easy to get.”
Look at the bowl!
Okay, now it’s hot enough to add a few kernels.
What’s a kernel?
Like when you pop.
It’s a seed.
What if you, like, would you think … a popcorn seed.
Like a popcorn seed. Could you grow popcorn?
Smolkin & Donovan, 2002
T:
Oh, excellent, excellent question! Let’s read and we’ll
see if this book answers that question, and if not, we’ll
talk about it at the end.
Smolkin & Donovan, 2002
In a nonfiction interactive read-aloud,
a teacher can . . .
 Link a word to its context
 Help children infer causal relationships
 Tell about how texts are structured
 Model the use of fix-up strategies
Smolkin & Donovan, 2002
T:
C:
Alright, it hit the reef. Why did it hit the reef? Because it got . . .
(no response from children). What did it say? It said there was
A storm.
T:
Storm, right.
C:
They couldn’t see.
T:
Right, it did say that. Because they couldn’t see, and if they
were out . . .
C:
Were the people surprised?
C:
The storm blew it into the rocks.
T:
Exactly.
In a nonfiction interactive read-aloud,
a teacher can . . .
 Link a word to its context
 Help children infer causal relationships
 Tell about how texts are structured
 Model the use of fix-up strategies
Smolkin & Donovan, 2002
T: “And 100-year-old popcorn kernels were found in Peru that could
still be popped.” Now. This guy is doing different . . . It’s kind of like two
stories are going on. What is this part giving us?
Cs: (together) Information
T:
It is. And what is this doing?
C:
It is telling you.
T:
It’s giving us, right, steps of how to make the popcorn.
C: And he has a big old speech bubble.
T: Yes, because he’s reading about this, remember? And so his
speech bubble is him reading this book about this (pointing to pictures of
native peoples).
In a nonfiction interactive read-aloud,
a teacher can . . .
 Link a word to its context
 Help children infer causal relationships
 Tell about how texts are structured
 Model the use of fix-up strategies
Smolkin & Donovan, 2002
T:
“Insects live on the tree, too. This big cicada just crawled out of its
brown, shell-like skin. For several years . . . (teacher pauses. The next word in
the text is ‘it’)” Let’s start back here. “Insects live on the tree, too. This big
cicada just crawled out of its brown, shell-like skin.”
C:
(interrupting) We already read this.
T:
I know, but see, sometimes if you stop, it helps [to go back] It didn’t
make sense just reading [further in the text]
To what extent are you seeing
fully interactive read alouds?
What barriers are you facing?
The Vocabulary Catch-22
Children need to learn more words to
read well, but they need to read well to
learn more words.
McKenna, M.C. (2004). Teaching vocabulary to struggling older readers.
Perspectives, 30(1), 13-16.
Why Wide Reading
Is Enough
Vocabulary size and
the amount a child
reads are correlated.
Direct instruction
cannot possibly
account for the number
of word meanings
children acquire.
Why Wide Reading
Is Not Enough
Context is generally
unreliable as a means
of inferring word
meanings.
Most words occur too
infrequently to provide
the number of
exposures needed to
learn them.
Marzano, R.J. (2004). The developing vision of vocabulary instruction. In J.F.
Baumann & E.J. Kame’enui (Eds.), Vocabulary instruction: Research to
practice (pp. 100-117). New York: Guilford.
“There is no obvious reason why
direct vocabulary instruction and
wide reading cannot work in
tandem.”
– Marzano (2004, p. 112)
Perhaps one of the most important
reasons why teachers need to pay
attention to vocabulary is that
vocabulary knowledge is cumulative.
The more words you know, the easier
it is to learn yet more words.
– Stahl & Nagy (2005)
How do I know which
words to teach?
Two characteristics that make a word
inappropriate for teaching:
1. We can’t define it in terms that the
students know.
2. The students are not likely to find the
word useful or interesting.
– Beck & McKeown (2004)
Beck and McKeown’s Three Tiers
Tier 3
Tier 2
Tier 1
• Rare words
• 73,500 word families K-12
• Often content-area related
• Examples: isotope, estuary
• Important to academic success
• 7,000 word families
• Not limited to one content area
• Examples: fortunate, ridiculous
• The most familiar words
• 8,000 word families
• Known by average 3rd grader
• Examples: happy, go
Beck and McKeown’s Three Tiers
Tier 3
Tier 2
Tier 1
• Rare words
• 73,500 word families K-12
• Often content-area related
• Examples: isotope, estuary
• Important to academic success
• 7,000 word families
• Not limited to one content area
• Examples: fortunate, ridiculous
• The most familiar words
• 8,000 word families
• Known by average 3rd grader
• Examples: happy, go
Beck and McKeown’s Three Tiers
• Rare words
• 73,500 word families K-12
• Often content-area related
• Examples: isotope, estuary
Tier 2
• Important to academic success
• 7,000 word families
• Not limited to one content area
• Examples: fortunate, ridiculous
Tier 1
• The most familiar words
• 8,000 word families
• Known by average
“Goldilocks”
Words 3rd grader
• Examples:
happy,
go2004
– Stahl
& Stahl,
Tier 3
Once I find them, how
do I teach them?
After Reading . . .
1. Tell how the word was used in the
context of the story
2. Give a student-friendly explanation of the
word’s meaning
3. Have children say the word
4. Give two additional contexts in which the
word could be used correctly
5. Give the children a frame sentence to
generate their own context
What does this sound like?
• In the story, Bibot was a very fussy man. Fussy
means you focus on details, even if it hurts
someone’s feelings. Say the word with me.
• Someone might be fussy about the way her hair
looks, and not like to play sports, or an adult
might be fussy about eating, and not like to eat
at someone else’s house.
• Tell me something you might be fussy about.
Try to use the word fussy when you tell about it.
You could start by saying something like “I am
fussy about ________.”
And how can I
integrate vocabulary
and comprehension
instruction?
www.guilford.com
Classroom Model: Direct
Explanation
Organize lessons to include introduction,
modeling, interaction, and closure
Before reading, provide
• Declarative Knowledge: What strategy is to be
learned and used?
• Procedural Knowledge: How is that strategy
actually employed?
• Conditional Knowledge: When and why should
that strategy should be used?
What does this sound like?
“Today we are going to learn to find the main
idea in a science article. When you find
the main idea, you do three things: you
review the whole article, you think about
what the author thought was most
important, and you put that into a brief
statement. Readers find the main idea
after reading, and it helps them to
understand and to remember.
Research on Direct Explanation
Initial training included:
– Presentations on DE
– Lesson plan design by teachers
– Observation and feedback
Effects on students
1. They developed declarative, procedural, and
conditional knowledge
2. The did not have better standardized
comprehension scores
More DE
Second study of DE included
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Presentations on DE
Lesson plan design by teachers
Observation and feedback
One on one coaching
Collaborative discussions
Videotaped model lessons
Effects on students
1.
2.
3.
4.
Students again learned about strategies
Students did use more of the basal skills
Students used and described reasoning during reading
Standardized test scores improved
Specifying procedural knowledge for
teachers and children is a barrier to full
implementation of direct explanation. The
slides which follow provide the procedural
knowledge that Duffy has shared in
Explaining Reading.
Predicting
1. Look for clues in the text
2. Think about what you already know
about the topic
3. On the basis of prior knowledge and the
clues, predict what you think will happen
Monitoring, Questioning and
Repredicting
1. Keep your original prediction in mind
2. Keep asking whether that prediction
continues to make sense in light of new
information from the text
3. Use new information in the text and prior
knowledge about that information to
make new predictions
Imaging
1. Identify words the author is using that are
descriptive
2. Use prior knowledge about those words
and about your senses to create an
image in your mind
Inferring
1. Note the clues embedded in the text
2. Access your own experience regarding
the clues
3. Make predictions about the implied
meaning based on experience with the
clues the author provides
Looks-Backs
as Fix-It Strategies
1. Stop when the text stops making sense
2. Identify what is blocking meaning
3. Think about what strategy you know that
could be used to fix the problem
4. Apply the strategy
5. Test to see if the problem is fixed
Main Idea
• Put yourself in the author’s place
• Examine words and phrases for clues to what is
important
• Ask questions about what, in your experience,
the clues combined seem to say about what is
valued
• Decide what the main idea is by saying, “If I had
written this and said things this way, what would
that say about what I thought was important?”
Summarizing
1. Understand the concepts of beginning,
middle and end
2. Know the parts of a story
3. Review the book to identify the
information provided at the beginning, in
the middle and at the end
Drawing Conclusions
1. Think about the topic being discussed
and ask what the author wants readers
to think
2. Use experience about clue words
3. Ask yourself, “Why would I say about
what is being said here if I were the
author?”
Evaluating
1. Read what the text says
2. Note if there are gaps or inconsistencies
or flaws in the logic
3. Use prior knowledge to answer the
questions, “What do I think about this?
Do I agree? Do I have a different view?”
Synthesizing
1. Think about the content of each story
2. Decide how the stories are alike and
different
3. Identify common elements
4. Use experience about the common
elements to create a synthesis
To what extent are these skills and
strategies consistent with the ones in your
core program?
How could you help your teachers to
integrate strategy instruction by using the
core strategy and language and applying it
in a new text?
How could you make that simpler for
teachers?
Planning a Strategic ReadAloud
• Choose well.
– Consider students’ interests and needs.
– Consider vocabulary: are there words that at
least half your students don’t know?
– Consider text structure: how does this text
expand children’s text structure knowledge?
– Consider the rest of your curriculum: are there
ways to connect the theme of this text to other
things children are learning?
Planning a Strategic ReadAloud
• Analyze the material
– Identify tier 2 words
– Decide what background information to
provide
– Decide what strategy could be useful for
understanding the text
– Find places to stop and model
– Consider whether a graphic organizer would
be useful
Planning a Strategic ReadAloud
• Make a plan for building prior knowledge
– How can you relate content to students’ past
experiences? (“Have you ever …?”)
– Jot down information you want to provide
before reading.
– Plan a brief overview (“This story is about …”)
• Make a plan for introducing the strategy,
with declarative, procedural, and
conditional knowledge
Conducting a Strategic ReadAloud
• Read the book interactively
– Stop to model
– Stop to ask questions
– Stop to allow children to ask questions
• Show pictures after reading the text and
interacting with it
Conducting a Strategic Read-Aloud
• Use the graphic organizer to help children
generate a summary
• Review the strategy you’ve chosen
• Teach the Tier 2 words
So let’s try it . . . How can we plan fully
interactive read alouds that include both
comprehension strategy instruction and
direct instruction in word meanings?
How can we make a simple lesson plan
frame to guide teachers in planning and to
guide ourselves in observing and
coaching?