Making students talk about expository texts

This study presents a comparison between how six teachers and their 17-year-old students talked about texts in civics and nursing science during regular lessons and during two lessons where structured text talk in smaller groups was used. The majority of students were poor readers and attended vocational programmes. The text talks were videotaped. During the regular lessons, most of the teachers asked purely factual questions where the students just had to retrieve information from the text to be able to answer them. The students made few inferences and reflections. After the regular lessons, the teachers were invited to participate in seminars led by the investigator. In these seminars, a special model of structured text talk was practiced before videotaping a second and a third time. The results demonstrate that during the structured text talks the teachers' question types had undergone a change. The number of purely factual questions had decreased. Instead there was an increase in the number of inferences and half-open questions. The students read more actively during the structured text talks. They clearly made an effort to explore ideas in the text and made numerous inferences and reflections.