Discover how Principal, Francis Matisi engaged EAL students with The Hobbit, using shared reading, pauses, and discussion to build comprehension. Despite challenges, her students embraced the text, leading to a powerful teaching approach aligned with Questioning the Author research. Learn how this method fosters deep understanding and active student participation in complex texts.
All the time I think we do need to do this and even with what we think they may know. Working recently with some Year 7 and 8 students and some video watching to give background knowledge before text reading,and then text reading about ANZAC day. So often we had to stop and discuss things sentence or 2 by sentence or 2. These are English speaking students. I was flabbergasted to discover none of the students knew what 'dawn' meant and when it occurs in the day. Gave me a jolt into thinking about how much can be taken for granted, but how much presume students know but they don't. With the explaining and sharing of ideas how much their understanding improves.
Thank you Tracey. It is remarkable when you dig a bit deeper to see how much might be going over students’ heads from a text. I agree that this approach of pausing and interspersing discussion whilst reading the text together is intuitive and makes sense. McKeown and colleagues really explain some key techniques for making this work effectively and equitably across the group 🙏🙏
This is exactly how difficult texts are taught at Senior English where students don’t choose the subject and thus are faced with texts they would not choose and in many cases, cannot access independently. Reading together, frequent pauses and explanations of prophecy, seer, Sphinx and secular and everyone can experience the brilliance of Oedipus. Bravo to this teacher and her students for persisting!
It’s interesting how intuitively workable solutions to problems like this can seem innovative especially in primary school settings where teachers may have been drilled in how to teach comprehension in a particular way that revolved less around text and more around strategy! Thanks for sharing Kristy
All the time I think we do need to do this and even with what we think they may know. Working recently with some Year 7 and 8 students and some video watching to give background knowledge before text reading,and then text reading about ANZAC day. So often we had to stop and discuss things sentence or 2 by sentence or 2. These are English speaking students. I was flabbergasted to discover none of the students knew what 'dawn' meant and when it occurs in the day. Gave me a jolt into thinking about how much can be taken for granted, but how much presume students know but they don't. With the explaining and sharing of ideas how much their understanding improves.
Thank you Tracey. It is remarkable when you dig a bit deeper to see how much might be going over students’ heads from a text. I agree that this approach of pausing and interspersing discussion whilst reading the text together is intuitive and makes sense. McKeown and colleagues really explain some key techniques for making this work effectively and equitably across the group 🙏🙏
This is exactly how difficult texts are taught at Senior English where students don’t choose the subject and thus are faced with texts they would not choose and in many cases, cannot access independently. Reading together, frequent pauses and explanations of prophecy, seer, Sphinx and secular and everyone can experience the brilliance of Oedipus. Bravo to this teacher and her students for persisting!
It’s interesting how intuitively workable solutions to problems like this can seem innovative especially in primary school settings where teachers may have been drilled in how to teach comprehension in a particular way that revolved less around text and more around strategy! Thanks for sharing Kristy