About Reader's Workshop: Talk and Reading

So, I'm three days into my winter holidays and I was getting slightly bored so I picked up a book from my massive pile of 'teaching books to be read'. This one, Tell Me by Aidan Chambers, was picked up at the Lifeline Bookfest, so is a little older (published in 1993). However, it highlights the importance of talk in reading.

I'm finding this particularly useful for a number of reasons. First of all, how important is talk in reading? Can we develop any kind of successful reader, let along life-long readers without emphasising the place of talk? Secondly, how do we use talk throughout the school life of a child - what talk are we successfully using with Preps? How do we translate this into Grade 7s or Grade 12s? Thirdly, how can we use books to help talk? We have growing numbers of children arriving at school with speech difficulties. Can books/reading be used to work with these children?

The other thing Chambers points out is that without a 'reading environment' (a topic he's written another book on) it is very hard to cultivate successful talk about reading. It's interesting to think about how one piece fits in with another.

I'm only just into the book, but no doubt I'll be posting some of my ideas here as I go through it. So let me know if you have any thoughts, questions, musing on talk and reading and how they go together.

Photo from flickr