Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 53(5) February 2010 doi:10.1598/JAAL.53.5.8 © 2010 International Reading Association (pp. 423–426) 423 P icture this—a student giving you a big shoulder shrug when asked to retell what he just read. If you’ve taught longer than one week, this is an image that you can easily visualize. Asking students to recall what they have read and retell it in their own words can often be a daunting task. Teachers trying to offer sup- port will say, “Just visualize it!” But after a lengthy and uncomfortable pause, teachers realize the DVD player may not be turning inside the student’s head. The student sits, unable to speak, or mutters, “I don’t know.” The teacher is left to wonder if the student has learned something from the text but just can’t remember the details well enough to retell them or if the learner has not com- prehended anything from the text and is therefore unable to retell it. What’s Involved in Being Able to Successfully Retell? Let’s consider what must happen in the reader’s mind in order to be able to offer a full and accurate retell. To retell a story or share the salient factors of an infor- mational text, the reader has to do the following (Benson & Cummins, 2000): n grasp the meaning by understanding the language n apply the appropriate decoding strategies n recognize the text sequence n infer, coconstruct, and analyze what the author intended Students can be aided in developing their comprehension of a text as teachers model for them how to apply and regulate these strategies, which also include constructing mental images from text cues and creating graphic representations of the text structure as supports to getting the big picture of what the text is about (Wood, Lapp, Flood, & Taylor, 2008). Once completed, a graphic serves as a visual outline of cues that can be used to support remembering and retelling. Focusing on One Instructional Routine: Text Mapping Plus Mapping a story, which involves creating a graphic representation that shows the order as well as the characters and main events, is one instructional routine that can help students to improve and expand their comprehension and oral retells (Baumann & Bergeron, 1993). As students create their own illustrations as a part of the map, they are able to visualize and chronicle the parts or relationships of a story or text. Text Mapping Plus: Improving Comprehension Through Supported Retellings Diane Lapp Douglas Fisher Kelly Johnson Real-Time Teaching