Learning Text through Talk

3 Things I learned:
- I never really thought about pictures, still images, video, and sound as being parts of writing specifically until reading this article.
- Early writing experiences should include students orally representing what a text says whether it's words or pictures.
- Although I knew student to student talk was important in writing, I wouldn't have thought about doing conferences myself with individual students except for walking around the room and commenting and trying to get the students to inform me of their ideas.
2 Things I found Interesting:
- At the early ages when asking students to write, we should allow an abundance of talk also. "... since what children are doing is trying to get speech onto paper."
- "... 'writing' comes to mean more than just scratching with pen and paper." I just thought this was an interesting thought because all too often we do get caught up (especially when teaching young children) in how the students specifically write letters and words, and we miss the point of what is really going on in the work.
1 Question:
- So if we do individual conferences with the students and a the same time we have the students working together through their writing, how do we be sure that they are talking about the writing and that they are fixing and editing their work?

Related Media:
Pages 3-5 of this book are talking about the process of orally responding to observation in order to better understand it. However, I would suggest parts of this book to all teachers so that we can get a better grip on how to encourage talking through text and writing after the talk.

Resources:
Wells, G. (2001). Action, talk, and text: learning and teaching through inquiry. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.Retrieved from http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=oarDDlH_fJoC&oi=fnd&pg=PP7&dq=literacy+through+talk&ots=LEj3hAQiVg&sig=swMQeJxY72kjUhzsG6X2BPDdRxw#v=onepage&q=literacy%20through%20talk&f=false