Read Aloud.

Reading books over and over again out loud gets a little boring for adults, but children love it! I liked the comparison Doyle and Bramwell made between repeated readings to children and listening to a favorite song for adults. They write, “By the third or fourth time of listening to the piece, adults begin to anticipate what part is coming next; hum along with a favorite part…” (556). I had this experience with Britney Spears’ “Womanizer” (I’m a little embarrassed to say). When I first heard the song on the radio, I thought it was awful. I repeatedly bashed it to my boyfriend, sisters, and probably anyone who would listen to me. However, after hearing it over and over and over again on my drive home from work, I began to (gasp!) sing along. I tried to convince myself that, sure, maybe it was a fun song to sing along with, but it was still terrible. I still tell myself this, but I’m probably lying. The point is, the first time I heard the song, I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know the rhythm or the lyrics, so I was just a passive listener, much like a child who is being read a story for the first time. They might enjoy the story right away, or, like me, they might need a little while to become familiar with it. After I heard the song, I was singing along in my car, just like a child who happily reads parts with the teacher or answers questions about a familiar book. Who knew that radio stations were such good dialogic teachers!

I especially liked Doyle and Bramwell’s article on teaching socio-emotional learning through dialogic reading. Mrs. Bruss, the teacher in the article’s classroom, takes the time to get to know her students, observe their behaviors, and determine ways to help them develop socially, emotionally, and intellectually. I thought it was very important that Mrs. Bruss chose her read aloud books based on her students’ needs without singling out a specific child. She could have easily reused a lesson plan from the year before, but instead she saw that her students need some help developing socio-emotional skills like sharing, emotion control, and communication, so she chose a book that would address those issues. She could have just directly told Leo to share and Malik to control his emotions, but she choose a books to help the students work through their personal issues. Not only did she use the book to teach her students non-academic skills, but she also used it to develop vocabulary skills that would help the children better express themselves, and she incorporated the vocabulary into classroom activities that were not directly tied to reading.

I think librarians and teachers can work together to make dialogic reading extra effective. McGee and Schickedanz suggest reading different books with similiar themes to test students’ comprehensions skills and their analytic thinking. I think this would be a perfect way for librarians and teachers to collaborate. Together, they could choose books that have a similar theme, such as controlling emotions. Making connections between different books is a higher order thinking skill that requires students to have deeper understanding of the stories’ emotional and psychological meanings than simple retelling does. Hopefully by making connections between books, the students will also be able to connect the books to their lives, which has a stronger impact on their learning. By working together to set goals and determine connections they want the students to make, librarians and teachers can each do dialogic readings with the class. The students may read one book with the teacher in class and then read a similar book with the librarian. The books will be reread, discussed, and questioned, and the students will be asked to connect the classroom books with the library books. This method helps librarians incorporate classroom expectations into library time and also gives the students double the exposure to dialogic reading. Remember, most librarians were once classroom teachers or are certified teachers, so they are fully capable of helping out teachers. Teacher, use your resources!

In one of my other classes, we were discussing about how educators today spend so much time teaching emergent literacy learners <i>how</i> to read that they neglect teaching them how to read to learn. Reading to learn necessitates the development of critical thinking skills, being able to  evaluate information, making connections to one’s own life and to other books/information, etc. They are all those skills that you’re expected to have mastered by high school but never actually learned how to do. Teachers and librarians can teach students how to read and how to read to learn at the same time, and I think providing the class with informational texts is a good first step. Nonfiction books can make good read aloud stories, believe it or not. Most children are familiar with informational text because, like Duke mentions, they see their parents reading it all the time at home in newspapers, magazines, websites, recipes, etc. Even homes that don’t have a lot of books in them for whatever reason probably have some type of informational text that students can read or have their parents help them with. Some students, especially boys, prefer informational text to fiction, so if a teacher is frustrated by students not responding to dialogic read alouds, maybe she should try reading a nonfiction books. The same benefits of doing dialogic readings of fiction books applies to informational text as well, so teachers and librarians should not forget about different types of reading material.

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