Reading and Retelling

Cummins discussed the power of reading and retelling in learning.

Carrice Cummins' professional goal is to make reading clear and obvious to her students. She believes that children will have better comprehension if they learn the process of reading. "Readers," she said, "need to form pictures in their minds as they read. They need to get into the mind of the author."

Cummins' research was presented in two sessions of the first Literacy Promise Conference held in Salt Lake City in March. Her sessions were titled "The Art of Making Text Explicit" and "The Power of Retelling."

"What is the logic by which students learn?" asked Cummins. She states that it is not always the logic by which teachers teach. She briefly summarized the work of psychologists Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsy and Frank Smith and their varied approaches to learning. Their research teaches us, among other things, that students need six or seven exposures to a concept before they learn it and that new information needs to connect with existing knowledge. Students learn by talking and writing about new concepts.

Students come with their own cognitive schema or theory and teachers unlock reading skills by making sure there is a common understanding of text and topic knowledge before the process begins. Cummins suggests a three-step process for reading comprehension: immerse or read aloud, analyze or dig deeper, and organize or chunk like items together. Cummins advocates teaching students to read like a writer.

In her second session, Cummins discussed the power of retelling that she believes is an all-purpose, meaningful learning activity. She stated, Teachers need to rethink retelling and think of it as a critical skill, a language, a way to respond to text, and a fluency of thought. Before retelling can be used as an assessment, it must be taught." Children may not have much practice in recounting or retelling an activity once it ends. The preparatory process that Cummins calls "pretelling" is procedural, sequential thinking. It helps children learn to think backward to recall information. Leading children to retell an activity or a story requires practice in thinking backwards in order to think forward. As they retell the event or story they are picking out important concepts, placing them in order, and creating meaningful context.

Cummins demonstrated how to teach retelling; it is the transfer of responsibility. First, the teacher models the process by retelling an event. The next step is retelling with the student and finally, retelling by the student.

Carrice Cummins has been an educator for over 30 years, serving as an early childhood director, elementary and secondary classroom teacher, administrator, staff developer, professor, and educational consultant. She is currently an associate professor at Louisiana State University where she teaches graduate courses in reading and early literacy and pursues various research interests. She just completed a three-year term as a member of the Board of Directors of the International Reading Association.

4 April 2008