Fascinated by Dajder and Senson's Digital Storytelling piece. I am currently researching and writing my thesis on reading comprehension challenges among children with receptive and expressive language challenges. Often these students have decent phonemic awareness, but they find it difficult to retain information and draw meaning from text. There are many reasons, but a significant factor is an inability to create mental imagery from the vocabulary they read. They're seeing only the letter symbols the represent the words, not "seeing" the meaning. Readers with good comprehension create rich mental imagery on a virtually automatic, rapid-fire basis. Often, readers with language-based disabilities can't.
The work of Nanci Bell and Mel Levine stress the importance of working with students to help them build their concept imagery to improve comprehension. Bell has created a system (Verbalizing and Visualizing) where the teacher/tutor will have students view and discuss visual detail from pictures, and eventually, text. Over time, she has found that her students develop richer and more automatic mental imagery that lead directly to deeper understanding of text.
I'm inspired to try to employ the iMovie "visual think aloud" into the work I'm set to do with my focus student. As described in the article (and graphic), it looks like a fantastic tool for combining image observation and voice to increase comprehension.
Jamie Hooper
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I've used Verbalizing/Visualization techniques with students with language learning delays with great results. Please let me know how it goes using iMovie to support that process! -Jessica
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