"Text Talk" and Chapter 4

The article gave lots of insight about ways that teachers can fail using questions with read-alouds; however, I feel the article went in circles talking about problems and offering no solutions.  I did like how the article discussed that texts must be "conceptually challenging."  Since I do not have much experience seeing children at different grade levels, I often forget how smart students are and how much they can understand because of their limited reading abilities.  As I was reading the article said that pictures should not be shown while reading because students will focus more on pictures than the text, but how do you read a picture book to a child without showing pictures.  Isn't it important to walk through the pictures before reading to allow students to predict?  I had a personal connection with the section of the article that discussed students focusing too much on background knowledge and what they know about the subject.  Last semester when reading a book to my kindergarten class I asked a question about their experiences/knowledge, and I had great difficulty getting the students back on the task of paying attention to the book.  The article discussed how it is important for teachers to appropriately activate students' schemata, but they left me wondering how to do this without having students stray off topic.  The book discussed that shared reading promotes metacognition, and we love discussing metacognition in CIR 411!  I like the idea of using shared readings followed by think-alouds to help students practice critical thinking.  The article stated that read-alouds do not have strong effects according to studies.  I disagree with this, because when students have opportunities to practice their oral language comprehension they will have an easier time grasping concepts that teachers lecture in higher grades.  This skill will allow students to learn so much more from classes as they get older.