Literacy Matters - Vol 21 - Winter 2021

Setting a 5-8 minute time limit for each mental imaging and verbalizing round makes MI & V practices flexibly infusible practices in a set curriculum. Anecdotal feedback from teachers the author has trained over the past 20 years with classroom versions of the MI &V practices encourage teachers to implement them in short increments regularly as teachers noticed increased confidence in students’ abilities to recall read information (i.e., main idea, supporting details, reasons, the sequence of events). Group Designs and Dynamics Typically, three to five students are in a group at a table or placed on the floor in designated spaces. Uni-colored towels can serve as spaces where students place keyword cards or colored squares. There are several ways to group students. Struggling students can be paired with a stronger, supportive peer who has been shown how to make sure that the struggling team partner contributes in sharing mental images to demonstrate comprehension. Teachers can also set up groups by skill levels. One teacher-designated student per group takes on the role of text reader or responder to questions while the others engage in creating images/movies in their heads based on what the listening or oral dialog task reveals. Such group leader roles change with each round of MI &V practice to those that can handle the reader or question responder task to ensure that each group member engages in visualization and verbalization practices. Materials All materials used (pictures, sentences, paragraphs) must target students’ active vocabulary and knowledge. Sentence frames can foster the use of academic sentence structures in a visual display (Beck et al., 2012). These can be displayed on small or large classroom posters, colored reminder sheets or cards at group workspaces, or individual student language folders. Information on developing these visual resources is provided in the MI&V practice phases. Teacher Tasks Prior to each of the described practice phases, teachers model the practice procedures for the whole class so that everyone knows what to do and what to say. For ELs and others in need, teachers visually share the procedural steps and language prompts (i.e., sentence frames for questions and answers) on the board or on task charts available for each group to see. These can include icons that visually represent information for ELs’ in early language acquisition stages or others with print or sound processing challenges. After each practice phase, teachers engage students in reflecting critically on the experiences to strengthen self-monitoring comprehension skills (Pratt & Urbanowski, 2016). During a practice round, teachers rotate from group to group and take notes on observed challenges and successes (See Figure 2). These serve as post- practice comments and help adjust future practices accordingly and in individualized student conferences as needed.

Next, details about each of the four MI &V practice phases are shared and links to two videos the author created to demonstrate the described practices. Phase 1: Mental Imaging and Verbalizing with Images The first MI &V phase includes page-size images. One student per group receives a picture not shared with peers in an envelope. The picture represents a simple, realistic action with few people or animals. As students become more confident mental imagery users or differentiate mental imaging and verbalizing challenges, the complexity of image details per picture can increase. Appropriate pictures can be found in magazines (i.e., science or social studies magazines, children’s magazines), animal or nature calendars, on the internet, or topic-related teaching materials. Pictures must represent what is in students’ active knowledge and language repertoire. The person holding and seeing the picture responds to peer questions mostly with “yes” or “no” answers or more information if they struggle to visualize what is on the picture. Those in the image-making role add to their mental picture what each response provides and verbalize it, saying, “ What you say makes me picture ....” To assist those drawing mental pictures in thinking of a variety of questions, they see keywords on cards (3x5 or larger) in front of them such as “where,”“when,”“number,”“action,” or “mood.” (see Figure 3). Teachers can scaffold the use of these prompting cards by gradually increasing how many and which ones to be used. For instance, the “perspective” card could be introduced after students are comfortable using basic cards like those mentioned above. For ELs or others in need of additional support, these keyword cards can be supported with pictures such as a small clock or watch for the “when” card or a smiley and a sad face for the “mood” card. Furthermore, students in need of academic sentence structures to ask questions in their search to add details to their mental images/movies can turn a keyword card over to find sample sentence frames on the back. Such sentence frames can be attached with a piece of tape on a second card so that it folds forward from behind the keyword card. This way, only those that need this support access it. Figure 3 provides an overview of essential keywords for questions with selected sample sentence frames. Keywords were adapted from those used in the original program designed by Bell (2007). The original keywords did not contain images or sentence frames. Students who create mental images listen to their peers’ inferences in their groups and can confer with their peers making inferences such as “ I think it is …because I heard…, or “ I disagree because I heard…and I picture ....”. Teachers explicitly teach such language structures and prompt them during group practices as needed to strengthen students’ oral academic language skills. Once students have collaboratively figured out the content of a picture, everyone gets to look at it and discuss what strategies they used, what helped, and what confused them when creating a mental image. If teachers have distributed different pictures related to one topic (i.e., mammals, the life cycle of a butterfly, community helpers) at

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