ABSTRACT
The reading-aloud curriculum genre is a common routine present in most elementary classrooms in the United States (Dickinson, Hao, & He, 1995; Martínez & Teale, 1993). The events in reading-aloud comprise the text read by the teacher of course, but also the complex talk that is jointly constructed between teacher and students as the written text is discussed or talked about (Teale & Martínez, 1996). Teachers have been observed to conduct read-alouds of storybooks in very different styles, modeling for students different ways of approaching, responding to, and thinking about
literacy events in general, and texts in particular (Dickinson & Keebler, 1989; Dickinson & Smith, 1994; Martínez & Teale, 1993). These observations indicate the importance of classroom discourse as a powerful tool that can realize the notion of literacy learning as cultural apprenticeship. This oral text, which is constructed in the reading-aloud routine, has the potential to make the unspoken aspects of literate ways of thinking explicit to young children (Reder, 1994; Wells & Chang-Wells, 1992).
