Booktalk - Teaching Approach
Booktalk
Discussion about books forms the foundations for working with books. Children need frequent, regular and sustained opportunities to talk together about the books that they are reading as a whole class. The more experience they have of talking together like this the better they get at making explicit the meaning that a text holds for them: a child quoted in Aidan Chambers' book Tell Me: Children, Reading & Talk with The Reading Environment Thimble Press 2011 says 'we don't know what we think about a book until we've talked about it'.
This booktalk is supportive to all readers and writers, but it is especially empowering for children who find literacy difficult. It helps the class as a whole to reach shared understandings and move towards a more dispassionate and informed debate of ideas and issues.
On this page we offer suggestions for the kinds of questions that teachers and children might use in discussion. These questions are shown in italics.
Getting the talk started
Once they have heard a book read aloud, the class can begin to explore their responses to it with the help of what Chambers calls 'the four basic questions'. These questions give children accessible starting points for discussion:
Tell me…was there anything you liked about this book?
Was there anything that you particularly disliked…?
Was there anything that puzzled you?
Were there any patterns…any connections that you noticed…?
The openness of these questions unlike the more interrogative 'Why?' question encourages every child to feel that they have something to say. It allows everyone to take part in arriving at a shared view without the fear of the 'wrong' answer.
As children reply it can be useful to write down what they say under the headings: 'likes', 'dislikes', 'puzzles', patterns'. This written record helps to map out the class's view of the important meaning and is a way of holding on to ideas for later. Asking these questions will lead children inevitably into a fuller discussion using more general questions. They can respond to a particular illustration as well as to the text. Once children are used to working with the 'Tell me' questions they can use them as a scaffold for talking about their reading with each other.
Asking the 'special' questions
'Tell me' also contains suggestions for the 'special' questions to use once discussion had taken off. These are questions which direct children's attention more closely to themes or ideas that are particularly important to an understanding of the story but which might otherwise be overlooked.
The 'Tell me' questions can be downloaded from Classroom Materials.
CLASSROOM MATERIALS
Additional Sequence Resource, Tell Me questions