Best Practices in Literacy ~ An Overview

The following information was downloaded from the website for the Foundation for Comprehensive Early Literacy Learning. If you would like more specific information about how Shared Reading and Reciprocal Teaching are used in the HV Classroom curriculum, click on the corresponding link in the side navigation table.

Reading Aloud
Reading aloud to students allows them to experience great examples of literature, works they would not be able to read on their own at this point in their learning, and to experience a variety of forms and styles of writing. It acquaints them with the language and form of books and allows them to appreciate the pleasure that comes from reading without having to concentrate on the mechanics of decoding the printed word. Reading aloud encourages them to want to emulate the reader and to acquire the skills that will allow them to enjoy the pleasure and satisfaction of reading for themselves. The listening and thinking skills used during reading aloud help students with the development of comprehension skills that are used when students read themselves.

Shared Reading (SR)
In the classroom, the reading done with students is called shared reading. The technique of shared reading in the classroom was created to replicate the experience of storybook reading, where the student follows along as the adult reads aloud. Shared reading is commonly done with books large enough to allow a group of students to see the print and follow along. Shared reading can also be done with poems and songs that are written on chart paper or the overhead projector and with the products of interactive writing activities. The teacher’s role in shared reading is to: 1) choose appropriate material, 2) point to the text while reading word-by-word for beginning readers and phrase-by-phrase or line-by-line for more advanced readers, 3) read along with the students, 4) read in a fluent and expressive manner, 5) select explicit skills for direct instruction, and 6) observe the students' responses and behaviors.

Reciprocal Teaching (RT)
Reciprocal teaching is an instructional approach that is used to help students read for meaning and monitor their comprehension. It is a small group activity that uses the major strategies of predicting, clarifying, questioning, and summarizing to encourage thinking during the reading process. This approach focuses more on reading in the content areas but is appropriate for literature as well.

Interactive Writing
Interactive writing is a process in which the teacher and the students collaborate on the construction of the text and share the role of scribe. The negotiation of text is a process that develops thinking, planning, refining and consolidating while at the same time developing appropriate language structures and increasing vocabulary. Types of interactive writing provide different levels of support. In transcription, students focus on known text and how that text was constructed. In innovation, students also work with known text but add their own thinking and writing to the end product. In negotiation, students and teacher share the responsibility for deciding what to write and then the writing itself. The teacher and students can work at many levels of competence, from letter recognition and formation to learning various types of writing. Interactive writing is an effective method to support skills development in beginning readers, focus on the confusions of struggling readers, and teach advanced writing skills to more proficient readers and writers.

Independent Writing
Independent writing is the ultimate extension of all the other methods of writing instruction. The goal is that the students are all given the time necessary to independently write text, incorporating all they have learned in large group and small group writing methodologies.