Critique of: Interactive Read Alouds: Teachers and students constructing

knowledge and literacy together.

This paper is an academic critique of qualitative research article “Interactive read Alouds”:
Teachers and Students Constructing Knowledge and Literacy Together. Written by Angela
Wiseman (2010), researcher is an assistant professor of literacy education, and teaches reading
and language arts methods courses in the elementary education at North Carolina state
university, Raleigh NC, USA.This paper aims to describe the main theme, methodology,
findings, strengths and weaknesses of the article.

Main Theme

The main theme of the article is to explore how a teacher can support student’s learning
by implementing interactive read aloud as a component of the kindergarten literacy curriculum.
According to the researcher, interactive read alouds is an important literacy ritual that can
encourage students’ participation and provide important information about how books work in
variety of ways.
The interactive read aloud is the important component of reading instruction, which
provides opportunity for open-ended responses, combined with specific reading instructions as
student focus on topics such as text structure, reading comprehension and literacy understanding,
thus encouraging young children to develop their knowledge of reading.
Researcher compares the transactional nature of read alouds with (IRE1) approach. She
gives strong argument by saying that research has shown that many teachers follow the IRE
pattern rather than approaching discussion as an opportunity to co-construct ideas and
perspectives with student, but transactional nature of the interactive read aloud provides
opportunity to develop complex thinking and learning as students make meaning together and
contribute to the literacy knowledge of the classroom.
Researcher in her article emphasis on interactive read aloud as a component of the
reading instruction in kindergarten classroom, because when children respond to text, they will
be informed by their own lives and experiences. In the second part of the article, researcher
shows that how four important aspects of the teacher discourse resulted in rich interaction, and
kindergarteners along with teacher read and make sense of the text together.
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Initiate, respond, evaluate
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 In fact transactional nature of the interactive read aloud gives the opportunity to children
to create relation with text on the basis of their own culture and identity. It will increase their
cognitive development for example, when teacher showed them the pictures to compare with
their own personality, the student’s cognitive level developed. Researcher’s focused audience in
this article is teachers and curriculum developers.

Methodology

It is a nine months ethnographic study in African- American kindergarten classroom

consist of 21 children all African- American, and a Caucasian female teacher.
Researcher collected the data on daily basis. She used the method of observation, as
participant-observer she observed the classroom during morning classes.
She audio taped 54 read alouds. As a secondary form of data collection researcher
conducted informal and formal interviews with teacher and children, Students’ writing journals
were copied for analysis. Informal conversations with the teacher and children were also
recorded and transcribed.

Findings

After coding and analyzing the data researcher has four major categories of teacher’s
instructions, which she calls confirming, modeling, extending and building. Researcher shows
how teacher was confirming students’ replies and motivating them to response to the text of the
story, teacher was making herself model and showing children how to comprehend the text of the
story, then she was extending students’ knowledge by taking them into the deep meaning, and
finally student and teacher built meaning together by scaffolding and building understanding in a
social context.
Researcher finds two pedagogical implications regarding to the interactive read alouds.
First transactional approach. In transactional approach education is viewed as a dialogue between
the children and the curriculum. And this approach provides the opportunity to students to build
meaning on their previous knowledge. And second the text selection, to build the meaning of the
text, the selection of the text is very important. Appropriate text selection is very crucial for
teacher in the classroom; the text should represent the culture and identity of the children.
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Strengths

One of the strengths of the article is the simple language used by the researcher.
Researcher does not use any jargon in the article. Researcher uses clear and understandable
language throughout the article. All the important key terms have been defined by the researcher.
Purpose of the article also has been defined clearly by the researcher. I found the article
purposeful, because before going to the research field researcher had a purpose in her mind that
was to explore the teacher’s role in implementing the interactive read aloud as a component of
the kindergarten literacy curriculum, and I think at the end she succeeded in finding that role.

Yet another strong point in this article is data triangulation, it means data coming from
various sources, for example, observation, interview and document analysis. By using
triangulation method of data collection researcher makes her data authentic.

I think interactive read aloud is a very attractive method of teaching for children in
kindergarten, because it provides the opportunity to children to actively participate in the
classroom discussion and make meaning and sense of the stories in their context.

The researcher’s audiences are teachers and also curriculum developers. So, teachers can
improve their teaching style by following such type of methods which researcher has mentioned
in her article. At the same time curriculum developers can use this study in order to develop
curriculum, according to the needs of the kindergartners.

Weaknesses

One of the weaknesses of the article is that, she did not mention the exact age of the
children in the article, although she mentioned they were kindergartners, but by not mentioning
the age of the children she creates confusion in the reader’s mind.

Dilemma with transactional approach is that in this approach learning is seen as social
versus learning is individual. According to Berlak and Berlak(1981), “ from the individual
perspective, learning is a private encounter between child and material .The ideal ratio of student to teacher though
hardly possible in the real world is one-to-one. From the social perspective learning proceeds best most efficiently
and effectively- if there is interaction among the persons learning” Dewey, for example, whose thinking is central
to the transaction position, argued that learning should be a social process.

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 Application of the study in rural context is difficult. Because this study has been done in
urban multicultural context, so in rural context where all children can share similar
characteristics, and belong to same culture, using multicultural text does not make sense.

The most important weak point in this article is the effectiveness of teacher-pupil
interaction, because teacher and pupil have different cultural expectations about how to use
language, so that class-room conversations are not based on mutually-understood ground rules
for communication.

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REFRENCES

Berlak, A, S & Berlak H. (1981). Dilemmas of schooling. New York: Methuen