Reading Post 2: Shared Reading

This article, Shared Readings: Modeling, Comprehension, Vocabulary, Text structures, and Text features for Older readers by Fisher, Frey and Lapp discusses how shared reading is effective for student achievement. Shared reading includes a variety of different classroom activities in which the teacher and student actively share a text. For example, there is echo reading which is when the student echoes what the teacher reads, cloze reading which is when the teacher reads aloud and pauses for students to fill in missing words, and choral reading which is when both the teacher and student read aloud together. The article emphasizes that shared reading is not only effective with emergent readers, but with older readers as well. Although there is proof that shared reading is effective for any type of learner, research has also shown that teachers find it difficult to model this in their own classrooms. This specific study focuses on how teachers that are using shared reading in their classrooms practice and what are some reoccurring patterns of application amongst these teachers.

The interviews conducted on teachers from grade levels 3-8 and they mainly focused on the components of typical shared reading, the frequency of use, the process being used and the reaction to four themes. The study found that teachers modeled their thinking using comprehension, vocabulary, text structures and text features. On commonality was that students could see the text being read; some teachers used a class set of books, others photocopies of specific texts, and others projected the text on the screen. Another thing that all 25 teachers did was model their own thinking; they did not ask individual comprehension questions.

A main focus when it came to modeling amongst all these teachers was reading comprehension during a shared reading. Some teachers used strategies like activating background knowledge, summarizing, clarifying, visualizing, monitoring and connecting. Other strategies used included inferencing, predicting, questioning, synthesizing, and evaluating. The examples in this article show that this can be done on a third-grade level or even a sixth-grade learning level. For example, the teacher can hold a book up and make inferences of the pictures in the text to her class: like, "This boy has a frown on his face I think he is upset because this boy next to him has all the toys and he has none". Or maybe for a higher-level class make a connection to what we have been learning in class: like, "Wow, this character in the story is surely not taking care of his plant, but like we learned in science we can help a plant stay alive and grown by feeding it sunlight and water.

This article is extremely helpful as a future educator, because not only does it explain why shared reading is effective. It also gives a variety of examples of how it is actually implemented in the classroom. What I also found helpful was that the examples included all grade levels from third to eighth. This was helpful because oftentimes people believe that shared reading is only effective for emergent readers, but it actually can be effective for advance readers for comprehension. I really enjoyed this article and gained a lot of great tips and strategies for shared reading.