What is Talk For Reading and Why Talk For Reading?

Reading To Children

Reading is a basic skill that allows children to find out about and learn from the world around them. However, young children, especially those in early childhood settings, have not yet mastered the skill of decoding written words independently. That is why reading to children is so crucial to their literacy development.

Reading aloud to kids removes the decoding obstacle so that they can focus on understanding and become more engaged with the tale. By hearing stories, children are exposed to complex vocabulary, varied sentence structures, and complex ideas that they might not hear in daily conversation. In addition, the storyteller’s voice, intonation, and expression are necessary to bring the story to life. Children can learn about emotions, character motivation, and the story’s tone in a way that words alone cannot provide. This exposure prompts them to think like readers, predicting events, linking ideas, and interpreting characters and actions.

From an author’s point of view, there is more to a book than can be uncovered in one read. The messages, themes, and levels of meaning are uncovered in multiple reads. A single lesson is never enough to reinstate the learning potential and themes that a picture book has to provide. This is where Talk For Reading is employed as an efficient approach to maximising storytelling in early years teaching.

What is Talk For Reading?

Talk For Reading is an interactive reading strategy that allows children to explore stories and gain comprehension through discussion and storytelling—one of the oldest ways of learning. It gets children to listen, imagine, talk, and think deeply about what they hear.

This approach is founded upon reading to children and encouraging learning through social interaction with teachers and peers. As opposed to other reading programs with templates for lessons cast in stone, Talk For Reading has a flexible framework designed to promote comprehension and engagement. It is comprised of three stages: Introduction to a text, Investigation, and Independently Understanding that guide children through from an initial glance at a text to a deeper understanding of its themes, characters, and perspectives.

As a teacher and an author myself, one of the most exciting aspects of Talk For Reading is how it allows for a deep exploration of a book’s main themes, characters, and settings in relation to other subjects and cross-curriculum priorities. It also encourages children to consider a variety of different perspectives, including the author’s intentions and their own interpretation, to deepen and make more meaningful and memorable the reading experience.

The Planning Process

Implementing Talk For Reading requires thoughtful planning to ensure children engage with the text meaningfully. The following steps are my personal method of planning a unit of work. While they are sequential, they do not necessarily need to be a strict linear process.

• Exploring the Text: Identify points of focus that will guide the length and structure of the unit. Consider themes, characters, and/or language features that yield productive discussions.
• Integrating Reading Skills: Determine what comprehension skills (e.g., predicting, connecting, questioning) will support my focus areas and planned activities.
• Forming a Unit: Combine literary features of text, reading skills and the curriculum together to form a draft unit.
• Lesson Designing: Map out a sequence of lessons to address the particular needs of the cohort, including hands-on activities with opportunities for interaction and discussion.
• Revision and Refining: Reflect on the success of lessons and refine them further based on the levels of student engagement and comprehension.

Each step will be elaborated in detail in the next set of articles along with examples for giving further clarification on its implementation.

Limitations

As much as Talk For Reading is an effective approach, my practice may have limitations:

• My understanding of Talk For Reading is based on my training and experience. To learn more about the approach, please refer to their official training resources.
• My area of expertise is Foundation Year to Year 2, so the strategies I refer to may not be as applicable to older children who require different literacy development.
• I do my planning primarily with picture books rather than written texts.
• While Talk For Reading supports comprehension and fluency (i.e., for upper junior groups), it does not explicitly teach phonics, decoding, or word recognition skills. Other literacy instruction must be included by teachers to ensure a balanced approach to reading development.

Conclusion

Talk For Reading is a powerful strategy that enhances early childhood literacy by facilitating deep interaction with texts through interactive discussion and storytelling. By removing the obstacles of decoding, it allows young readers to focus on comprehension, making reading more enjoyable and accessible. While my approach to Talk For Reading has specific limitations, as a supplement to other literacy strategies, Talk For Reading can significantly enhance children’s comprehension and appreciation of stories and lay a solid foundation for lifelong reading success.

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