MAJOR COMPONENTS IN READING

Major Components in Reading

Major Components in Reading

Children respond to stories in various ways. They may seek to understand a story through analyzing its plot, setting, characters, or theme-- the commonly called "narrative elements" of the story. To understand a story, they may also compare or contrast it to other stories they know; other cultural products like movies, TV programs, and commercials; or visual "texts" like paintings. They may compare and contrast the events in the story to their own lives, saying "That happened [or didn't happen] to me." Literary response may also include art, music, writing, sociodramatic play, and planned drama. The types of oral response that are the subject of this article represent another way of responding to stories. They are evidence of what I call "expressive, performative engagement."

Teacher read - alouds of books have for elementary schools instruction beyond the primary grades. The focus of this article is on supplementing elementary schools instruction with read - alouds and discussions of books that engage adolescents, enrich content knowledge, and stimulate higher order thinking. My goal is to provide a rationale and framework for reading aloud and discussing books with older students through a discussion of the planning and organization of the read -aloud of Discovering the Inca Ice Maiden.

To illustrate the engagement and learning of students, I will also provide excerpts of the discussion held during the read -aloud. This model may be helpful to other educators who strive to engage adolescents in elementary schools learning.

There are several types of response within the category of expressive engagement. In this section, I present a typology of those responses in order to flesh out the idea of the category and to extend and refine our theory of young children's literary understanding. This typology is the result of an analysis of children's responses in four previous studies (Sipe, 2000a, 2000b, in press; Sipe & Bauer, 1999) of young children's literary understanding as constructed during storybook read - alouds. These studies represent read -aloud discussions in two kindergarten classrooms and two first- and second-grade combination classrooms. In reading the transcripts of the read -aloud discussions, I paid special attention to children's conversational turns that represented expressive engagement beyond the usual analysis and interpretation of plot, setting, characters, and theme (which was the major activity in which the children were engaged). In other words, the data on which this article is based form a subset (about 10%) of the data from my four previous studies. Using the constant comparative method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), I constructed a set of five conceptual categories in order to describe the conversational turns that indicated expressive engagement. The resulting typology has five parts: dramatizing, talking back, critiquing/controlling, inserting, and taking over.

Reading books aloud is an ideal strategy for elementary schools teachers because of the short format, in -depth treatment of topics, and visual and content appeal of the books (Alvermann & Phelps, 1998; Farris & Fuhler, 1994; Neal & Moore, ...