Oral retellings are a way for a teacher to understand a student's language ability and reading comprehension. After reading a particular text, a student retells what the text said in their own words while the teacher assesses the quality of their summary.
Usually short texts (narrative or expository) or adaptations of a text are used, passages that let students consider information in writing and orally summarize what they've understood. A teacher hearing a retelling of a narrative piece is listening for accurate plot sequencing, story grammar, characterization, setting, as well as the problem the main character faced and how they solved it. In the case of informational text, the essential things that show comprehension is happening are a logical flow of accurate information and supporting details.
Oral retellings not only help teachers assess reading comprehension, but can also strengthen a student's understanding. Let's see how retellings can offer clues about each student's skills.
Glimpsing Comprehension and Insight
Think of oral retellings as an assessment for learning that propels learning even as you assess it. In telling about what she read, the student is at once extracting information and constructing it in real time. She has to process a large chunk of text, consider the sequence and events, and determine the importance of various elements. So she's also constructing her own personal meaning from the text.
For that reason, the goal isn't always a perfect match between what the author wrote and what the student says. Retellings are often socially situated, meaning the reader draws on their own knowledge and experiences to understand the text. For instance, in the retelling of a passage about clouds, a student might say, "There are lots of clouds," even though that's never actually stated in the text. These insertions should be analyzed as to whether they are either reasonable or inaccurate; a reader's accurate insights, not just their accurate recounting, can also be an indicator of comprehension.
For example, in a study of 4th graders' retellings of expository texts (with children who were proficient readers), 30 percent of the time the young reader's retelling didn't match precisely what the author wrote. It wasn't that students didn't understand what they were reading. When the teachers analyzed students' insertions and omissions that deviated from the expository texts, they found that the strongest readers drew on their own background knowledge about the content in the passage; they inserted additional facts they knew.
So some variance between what an author says and the meaning the reader takes away is often a natural part of the comprehension process. A teacher examining these 4th graders' summaries would've seen that a third of them not only understood well, they were already familiar with the content–and adjusted her instruction.
Supporting English Learners
Retellings can support the oral language skills of English learners, since this informal assessment requires students to put ideas written by another into their own words. Listen for how an EL student uses academic vocabulary, especially meaningful noun phrases from the text. The use of "aquatic plants" in a science article retelling, or "some pig" in one about Charlotte's Web gives you insight about a student's comprehension as well as their growing command of their second language. The way terms are used matters. If a student refers to land-based plants as "aquatic," for instance, they don't yet possess an accurate understanding of the term. Make note of contradictions to the text and provide future instruction to untangle misinterpretations.
Doing Retellings Virtually
As valuable as retellings are, the logistics for doing them can be daunting in a face-to-face classroom. In addition to the minutes needed to assess each child, retellings can be made more difficult by environmental distractions or background noise. When remote learning became necessary in the spring of 2020, teachers realized that some assessment techniques would have to change, and many realized that by having students do digital retellings, they could collect such informal assessments more often. Because digital retellings can be analyzed outside of a live classroom, they're easier for teachers to manage.
Once students have learned about retelling, they can read a passage and record their recounting of it at home. The teacher can view the recording, replaying it as needed to assess comprehension and language skills. By having five or six students each week do a retelling on video, a teacher can collect a retelling from every student monthly. These recordings can be used in a parent-teacher conference, or students might compare their own retellings from earlier and later in the semester to chart their own growth.
In the video accompanying this column, you'll see a 4th grader, Andre, retell the book As Fast as Words Could Fly (Tuck, 2013). His class was reading short biographies, and his teacher was using retellings as part of her ongoing reading comprehension assessments. Listen for Andre's creative use of dialogue and vocal inflections; he not only understands the text, he has developed a relationship with the characters.
Preparing for Retellings
Retellings shouldn't be left to chance; students need clear directions. Inform students in advance of a reading that they will be doing a retelling of that text. This establishes the purpose for reading and guides the student's attention to key information from the text.
To get things started, ask students how they talk about a favorite movie they've seen and make the connection between talking about a film and talking about a text. Here are some other suggestions:
- Explain that the purpose of retelling is to recreate the text in your own words.
- Model a retelling of a text they are already familiar with. After modeling, ask them to compare similarities and differences between the two (e.g., omitting unimportant details, using characters' names, providing lots of information about the beginning pages, but little information about subsequent pages).
- Read a new piece of text together and co-construct a group retelling.
- Develop a student-friendly rubric students can use to assess their own retelling and comprehension.
Valuable—and Possible
Oral retellings are a valuable assessment tool for comprehension and language. They aren't used as often as they might be in traditional settings because they're time consuming. Luckily, remote learning has increased the amount of such assessments any teacher can collect and analyze. As a bonus, doing these recordings at home might help both students and families feel more strongly involved in this informal analysis.
