Thinking Aloud about Reading Aloud
In a recent post about reading aloud, I mentioned that I generally discourage teachers from using reading aloud as a strategy in the classroom. In this post, I want to clarify that point.
First things first, if you’re teaching a play or dramatic text, then it should absolutely be read aloud. But it should be read with passion, with drama. It should be a performance. If you’re asking your students to read aloud, they should be given time to prepare.
If you happen to be teaching the very specific skill of public speaking, then there is obviously value in practising reading aloud from a cue card or a teleprompter.
In both of those cases, the performance is the larger part of the focus.
But let’s face it, this is not what’s usually happening when teachers use reading aloud in the classroom.
Far more often, the teacher will ask the students to read aloud from a text, usually taking turns to read a sentence or a paragraph each. The focus of this activity is on the content of the text, and the next activity is most likely to include comprehension questions.
When asked for the benefits of reading aloud in this way, I hear a number of responses, including most commonly the following:
1. It ensures the students are reading, because if asked to read silently, they might not read it, and we won’t know.
2. It is a good way to improve reading.
3. It is a good way to improve pronunciation and fluency.
So why do I discourage it so assertively? I’ll explain below, and I’ll respond to each of the three points listed above.
I’ll begin with a bold claim…
Reading aloud is not reading.
When we talk about reading in the context of learning and literacy or in the context of entertainment, we are talking about a very specific process, which involves decoding written text and internalising the information it contains.
But when reading aloud, this is often not happening. When reading aloud, the reader is generally more focused on enunciating individual words perfectly, rather than decoding and internalising meaningful phrases, with the primary goal of not making any embarrassing mistakes that might suggest they cannot read.
So it’s not reading, because it does not involve decoding information and comprehending the content, which is what reading is.
So then you might say, well at least it helps improve pronunciation and makes the student a more fluent speaker. But that leads to my next claim, which is a little more self explanatory…
Reading aloud is not speaking.
Just as reading is a mental–communicative process, so is speaking. To speak is to communicate ideas and information by encoding them into spoken language. It requires the speaker to develop thoughts in his own mind, organise those thoughts into a coherent idea, convert that idea into language and then express it in words and phrases.
To speak fluently is to be able to complete that process without pauses, false starts, reparations, hedges, fillers and so on such that the speech can be reasonably followed by the listener.
But of course, none of that is going on when the student reads aloud.
Reading aloud is essentially transposition, directly converting written text into spoken language. It can be done without any understanding at all, and the words that the reader is voicing are not coming from his thoughts but directly from the page in front of him.
It is akin to asking a student to directly transcribe the text printed on one page onto a blank page by had and suggesting that it will make him a better writer.
And in any case, when reading aloud, it is usual for the reader to treat words as individual units, enunciating each one in turn, thus undermining any sense of fluency. If you’ve listened to anybody read aloud — even a mature, literate, fluent native speaker of the relevant language — you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. It is very difficult to avoid sounding a least a little robotic when reading aloud, unless you’ve had the time to read and reread the text and rehearse the recital in advance.
This is not to mention the sheer fear factor that so many feel when they’re asked to read aloud. I simply don’t think it’s necessary or healthy to put a spotlight on students while the perform an activity they are almost destined to struggle to do and feel uncomfortable during.
So reading aloud is not a good way to practise reading and it’s not a good way to practise speaking.
If you want to practise reading, ask your students to read quietly for an extended period of time.
If you want to practise speaking, ask your students to have conversations where they express their own thoughts, ideas and opinions.
If you want your students to learn better pronunciation, don’t ask them to read! Ask them to listen. You cannot see how a word is supposed to sound by looking at it — not reliably in English, anyway — you need to hear it and then try it yourself.
Can you think of some benefits of reading aloud that I’ve missed? Or are you ready to kick reading out lout out of your classroom?
