Pause! Prompt! Praise! is a technique teachers can employ when students are reading aloud. Teachers should seek opportunities for reading aloud that are purposeful, for example, reading from the text in order to respond to a question in guided reading rather than simply taking turns.
The technique requires the teacher to pause the reading, prompt the student and praise the reading behaviour. Prompting is careful teacher questioning that will lead the reader back to the text. Choosing effective prompts will help the student develop a broad repertoire of reading strategies. Prompts should always be clear and lead to action.
Prompting Reading
Readers construct meaning from text by using information from semantic (background knowledge), syntactic (structure of language) and grapho-phonic (visual) information. The prompts the teacher uses are intended to help students get meaning from the text being read.
- Does it make sense?
- Can you see something in the picture to help you?
- What might happen next?
- Does it sound right?
- How would you say that?
- Try again and think what might come next?
- Does it look right?
- Do you know another word that looks like that?
- You said _________[nominate word]. Does it look right?
Prompting Writing
Similar approaches to effective teacher questioning or ‘prompting’ can be used in writing and spelling. The teacher should be excited and positive about each student’s attempts at writing and help the student reflect on them by prompting with questions.
- Say the sentence to yourself. Does it sound right? Does it look right?
- Say _______[nominate word] slowly. What do you hear at the beginning? How do you write it? Say it again slowly. What do you hear next? At the end?
- Do you know other words that sound like _____[nominate word]?
- Where could you find that word? Guide the student to look at the word wall and print around the room.
Communicating this strategy to parents
Teach parents this technique so they can use it when reading and writing with their children at home or when assisting in the classroom as parent-helpers.
Parents need to feel confident that what they are doing is useful. Providing them with simple tools like ‘prompting’ will help them know how to best respond to their children and at the same time support the approaches used in the classroom.
Like to know more?
Richards, Karen (1994) ‘Prompting’ in Lowe, Kay (ed) Growing into Readers. PETA, Sydney.
Read Chapter 3 for more details on using this technique and for more teaching tips. Richards also provides ideas to help parents ‘prompt’ at home. The prompts featured above have been selected from Richard’s chapter.
Delany, Val (1998) ‘Reading in the Early Years’ in Getting Started: Ideas for the Literacy Teacher. PETA, Sydney.
This article provides more ideas for teaching reading in the early years.
Holliday, Marcelle (2004) The Child, the School, the Parent: The Early Years. PETA, Sydney.
This package provides more information to support communication with parents, and useful ideas when planning to use parent-helpers in the classroom.
Nicoll, Vivienne and Wilkie, Lyn (1991) Literacy at Home and School: A Guide for Parents. PETA, Sydney.
This information is available as a PDF Teaching Tip Sheet. Download Pause, Prompt. Praise
© Primary English Teaching Association 2006. PO Box 3106 Marrickville NSW 2204 Tel 61 2 9565 1277. This page may be photocopied for the purposes of professional development but may not otherwise be reproduced without the publisher’s permission.