Academic Conversations includes a set of conversational concepts that can be modeled and practiced to help all students engage in extended meaningful conversation about narrative or informational texts (Zweirs, 2011). The skills include the following:
Academic conversations are important oral language uses to develop the deep comprehension task of interpretation of the content of a story. This “group interpretation” and discussion results in content needed for ultimately writing about the character’s challenge/trouble or problem, and then, how the character ultimately deals with it and moves on in life.
This is a multifaceted language processing task which requires students to respond in an expository way: state a claim, elaborate, clarify, support own and add to others’ ideas, challenge perspectives, paraphrase (“I think you mean...”) and summarize.
Deepening Discourse and Thought is road map for using Story Grammar Marker® with a selection of quality children’s literature for in-depth analysis which is necessary for building the narrative and expository language competency necessary for academic conversations.
Prod. No. 03 099G