Assigned PartsAdapted by Christina Porter from
Good-bye Round Robin, Michael F. Opitz, Timothy V. Rasinski
Prepare handouts of the text in advance: working in chronological order, sentence by sentence or paragraph by paragraph, highlight a chunk of the text so that each student will receive his/her handout of the text with one or more highlighted chunks, to be read aloud when the time comes. Assigned Parts can be done chorally, with two or more students receiving the same highlighted passages or speakers. In a narrative passage, the teacher or a student volunteer can read the narrator’s text, and students can be assigned to read only the dialogue for their assigned speakers.
Allow time for students to discuss the meanings of words and phrases as they are used in the text, to analyze their impact on meaning and tone, and to practice their assigned parts in advance. This practice enhances greater fluency and comprehension and encourages the habit of re-reading. Standards: RL4, RIT4, SL1, S 6, L4, L5 Choral Readings
Choral readings,
done with multiple voices in whole or small group settings, honor the oral
tradition of expression and can be an effective strategy for practicing and
improving fluency. Often done with poetry, monologues, and historical speeches,
choral readings encourage students to determine the central ideas of a text,
evaluate the speaker’s point of view, and explore the connections between
meaning and tone, meter, rhyme, and rhetorical patterns without the anxiety
often associated with oral reading and public speaking. With dramatic text,
some students can work in small groups adding sound effects to the reading. A
creative example of this is the choral reading for the three witches in Shakespeare Set Free: Teaching Macbeth,
edited by Christopher Renino (246-48).
Standards: RL1, RIT1, RL4, RIT4, SL1, L4, L5
ReQuest
From
Checking
for Understanding: Formative Assessment
Techniques for Your Classroom, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey
Also called
Reciprocal Questioning, this strategy is designed to teach students to question
a text they are reading for the first time and, through questioning, to grasp
the main ideas and the order and sequence of ideas and events. Used at the
beginning of a unit or extended text, it can also provide teachers with an
initial understanding of students’ background knowledge. Over time, this
reading routine can be transferred to students working in pairs.
- Either silently or in a read-aloud,
teacher and students read a segment of text.
- Students ask the teacher questions about
the content they just read.
- Teacher and students change roles. Now
everyone reads the next segment of text.
- Teacher asks the students questions
about the text.
- Students and teachers take turns back
and forth.
Standards: RL1, RL2, RL 3, RL4, RIT1, RIT2,
RIT3, RIT4, SL1
Readers’ Theatre
Adapted from Checking
for Understanding 80-81
In contrast to read-alouds like Assigned Parts
and Choral Readings, Readers’ Theatre begins with students working in small
groups to adapt a piece of text into a script. Then students rehearse a
dramatic reading of the script without props, costumes, sets, or memorization.
This reading activity requires students to comprehend and analyze the elements
of a text (the ideas and arguments, the evidence, characterization, vocabulary,
structure, purpose, point of view, and context) and to speak their script with
clarity and conviction.
Standards:
The act of transmediating a literary, rhetorical, or informational print text
into a script and a spoken presentation, Readers’ Theatre has the potential to
address all of the standards for Reading Literature and Informational Text. W3,
W4, W5, potentially W6, SL1, SL4, potentially SL5, SL6