Read-aloud Protocol Workshop

By Author: Jordon
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Once students have composed their letters and revised them once, into a somewhat polished draft, they are ready to engage in the read-aloud protocol workshop. I generally try to have students review each other's papers twice—once with an early draft, to which they respond only in terms of ideas, and the second time with the read-aloud protocol. Because of the close attention Omega Replica readers pay to language and style as well as ideas, this peer-review strategy works better with these more polished drafts than with drafts the authors know are rough.

Before we use this technique for the first time, I distribute a handout that includes a description of the protocol, a detailed explanation of the roles and duties of the reader and author, and sample proto-cols—two from Karen Schriver's article describing a use of think-alouds to teach students to diagnose problem areas in texts ("Teaching"), and one that I conducted on an essay a colleague was preparing for publication. We read the handout aloud, and I role-play one or more of the protocols, sometimes ...
... additionally modeling the read-aloud process with a student paper. In the sequence I describe here, students will also have experienced the method by sponding to published texts. The general instructions may be found in fig. 1

On the day of the peer-review session, I ask students to bring two copies of their drafts to class—one on which they will keep a record of the readers' comments and one clean copy (so each new reader can approach the text fresh)—and to form pairs with someone who has not yet read their drafts. I reinforce the roles of readers and writers, emphasizing again that readers are making sense of the essays, not fixing them. Students sit in pairs, side by side (to help the readers pretend the author is not there), decide who will be reader first, and begin. While they are working, I move around the room, stooping down beside each pair to listen in. The first time students attempt this kind of peer review, I often have to interrupt students who have read too much text without pausing or who have commented, "That makes sense." When I hear that, I interrupt with, "What makes sense? What do you understand?" Once the student answers, I ask more questions to prompt the reader to explore what he or she thinks about the piece.

I usually only need to intercede in any pair once; after that, students have a clearer sense of what it feels like to think aloud. Once I infer from my monitoring that students are working hard to speak their thoughts aloud and not just rushing through each other's papers, I also stop pressing them to pause after each sentence. While the initial emphasis on thinking through the text aloud after each sentence helps students remember to do so, most students I have worked with seem to develop a more natural rhythm of reading aloud and summarizing/predicting/questioning/responding aloud fairly quickly, sometimes even within the first session of peer review. In the sequence I describe here, students may have already developed such individual rhythms Tag Heuer Replica Watches before we reach the peer review stage, and the direction to stop after each sentence may no longer be necessary.

As students will have practiced this kind of reading aloud with published texts in the sequence I describe here, I expect to need to intercede less in the future, though some students may need the reminder to treat each other's texts as they have the published texts. Depending on how much time we have, I may tell students to stop and switch after half an hour or allow them to complete their read-throughs. I like to allow the authors to hear at least two read-alouds, so they have a sense of what interpretations are unique to a reader and what are shared understandings.