One Question Leads to Another: The Value of Talk in the Choral Reading of Poetry

This qualitative study of sixth graders in a language arts classroom explores how interpreting poems for choral reading deepened, enriched, and expanded their interpretations of poetry. Key factors in the process included students’ sense of freedom to interpret poetry in multiple ways, listening to their own and others’ voices speaking the lines of the poems, intimacy and trust developed in small-group work, and the opportunity to express their feelings through performance of the poems.