Teaching Adolescents |
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Read-alouds are precisely what they sound like: text read aloud (usually by the teacher) to a group of students who listen. When using read-alouds as a comprehension building activity, it is important to choose an appropriate text. Because the listener does not have access to the text and will not be asked to read the text, read- alouds are useful in a variety of contexts. One such area is in introducing students to the practices a reader assumes when tackling a more difficult text. Because text complexity “rises rapidly during the secondary school years” and students who are already struggling with reading may miss out on important content due to comprehension difficulties, read-alouds can be a great tool in modeling reading strategies for complex text as well as in getting important content to struggling readers (Fisher & Frey, 2012, p. 58). Across the curriculum, students in the middle and high school grades encounter increasingly difficult material as they leave elementary school, including concepts and vocabulary in math and science. In “Taking The Time to Read Aloud,” Patricia Braun (2010) cites read-alouds as not only a great strategy in supporting vocabulary acquisition, but in introducing new concepts or units. Braun mentions one science teacher who uses the New York Times best selling book The Canon by Natalie Angier with middle schoolers because of her engaging style of writing. While The Canon is certainly far above the middle school reading level, it works as an introductory text that gets students excited about the content to follow while at the same time exposing students to a more complex type of text. In electives, the sciences, math and the humanities, students who are read to are often exposed to very different types of texts and bodies of knowledge through read-alouds. Additionally, English language learners benefit greatly from the added language acquisition assistance that read-alouds offer (Fisher & Frey, 2012).
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Choosing to use read-alouds as a comprehension necessitates careful planning. Not only must the teacher choose an appropriate text, making sure to choose engaging, content appropriate and challenging texts; but the teacher must be familiar with the text and with the sections within it which might give rise to “pause and think” moments. A teacher using read-alouds should plan to pause and think out loud periodically throughout the text, perhaps even posing questions to the listeners so that they remain engaged in the reading, thinking and comprehending process (Fisher & Frey,2012). It is also vital that the teacher be familiar enough with the text to actually read it out loud fluidly. Students will likely not stay interested if the teacher struggles to read the text with ease and comfort in front of them. In the following video, a teacher explains how modeling reading through her read-alouds impacts students understanding of a text as well as the development of their own fluency in reading: |