ABSTRACT
Recent research has indicated that teachers vary in the style in which they conduct these reading-aloud sessions (Dickinson & Keebler, 1989; Dickinson & Smith, 1994; Green, Harker, & Golden, 1986; Martinez & Teale, 1993; Teale & Martinez, 1996). For example, Teale and Martinez (1996) showed that each of the six kindergarten teachers in their study, who all read the same four books (chosen by the researchers), had a distinctive style that emphasized different aspects of the books in discussion. For instance, one teacher treated stories as cohesive entities composed of interrelated elements, and had students work systematically on textually explicit story information; another teacher focused more on the words in a book and emphasized children predicting upcoming words in text; yet another teacher’s strategies involved eliciting ideas from the students, but much of the talk was concerned with unimportant information; and so forth. Thus, the talk, and the ways in which teachers direct and facilitate it, is a significant matter. The realized sign, or a teacher-reader’s representation of a text in the discourse of reading-aloud sessions (Golden, 1990), affects how children might make sense of books in the reading-aloud events themselves. According to Elster (1995), this may even contribute to how young, emergent readers subsequently reenact books that were read aloud to them.
