Reading aloud or silent reading?
ACTIVITY 9
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Before working through this section, take a few moments to reflect on the following: Many teachers feel uncertain about how to handle in class a text which students have not yet read. Should the group take turns to read it out loud, sentence by sentence, or should they process it silently for themselves? What is your view on this? Do you get students to read texts out loud? Why? Why not? |
The research literature, with few exceptions (eg Rees, 1980), is strongly opposed to reading aloud. It is the way most of us learned to read in our L1, and it is therefore assumed to be an appropriate practice for L2 as well, but this is rarely the case. Most texts used in class have not been written to be read out loud. In any case, a learner should never be asked to read an unseen text aloud, since it will almost certainly contain new words which he or she does not know how to pronounce and, in the case of written dialogues especially, reading aloud is likely to require sophisticated intonation patterns. If the aim is to teach pronunciation and intonation, it is far preferable to use dialogues, rhymes and poems with which learners are already familiar.
The fundamental problem is that in reading aloud the student has to concentrate so much on pronunciation that it becomes nearly impossible to focus properly on the meaning of what is being read: it is a common experience for a student to read a passage reasonably well but not be able to say anything about what he or she has just read. Usually the reading itself is also problematic, sounding hesitant and unnatural, and making it difficult for other students to follow. If you are not convinced, try the following:
ACTIVITY 10
| In the course of a normal lesson on an L2 text, ask one of your students to read something aloud that he or she has not read before and with which you yourself are not especially familiar. Don't look at the text itself while the student is reading - how much of it can you follow? During the reading take an unobtrusive look at the other students in the group. Are they concentrating? Do you think they are likely to be focusing on what is being read? |
To read aloud well, one needs to have studied the text and its meaning thoroughly first. It is therefore an advanced skill. Moreover, given that the activity merely allows readers to show what they have already learnt, it is in effect little more than a test.
Generally speaking, a far preferable approach is silent reading for meaning, which is both a more natural and more efficient approach to getting students to process a text for the first time. When working intensively on a text, silent reading clearly needs to be linked to questions, tasks and exercises which check that reading has indeed been done and that the level of comprehension is appropriate.
However, if it is not abused as a form of pronunciation training or is not persisted with for too long, reading aloud can be of some use in the early stages of language learning. The golden rule is that reading should never be 'cold' but should be properly prepared. Lewis and Hill (1992: 110-11) suggest a number of approaches:
- At very low levels, the teacher reads, followed by the class reading chorally sentence by sentence.
- Also for low levels, the class repeats chorally after the tape (more difficult than after the teacher).
- The teacher reads a paragraph, then the class reads the paragraph chorally, possibly followed by an individual reading the same paragraph.
- An individual reads sentence by sentence after the teacher.
- Students rehearse their parts: the class is divided into groups and each group prepares, for example, a paragraph, then one representative from each group reads so that the whole text is read aloud. In the case of a dialogue, groups prepare different speakers. In all cases, the teacher goes from group to group, quietly helping with pronunciation, stress and intonation problems, before anybody reads anything for the whole class.
- With dialogues, students prepare in pairs, the teacher goes round and helps, and then all students read aloud in pairs simultaneously, before one pair reads aloud for the whole class.
These are certainly interesting ideas, but with lower levels of proficiency even sentences can be too long and it may be better to break the text into short sense groups of a few words for each repetition. For example:
| ¿Qué vamos a hacer / durante mi visita? / Me gusta mucho la natación./ ¿Vamos a ir a una piscina / o vamos a estar unos días en la costa? / ¿Vamos a visitar unos castillos? / etc. |
A further method, probably better suited to intermediate and higher-level students and to texts without substantial amounts of new lexis, involves the teacher reading chunks of text aloud while the learner follows the written text. The learner then has to look up and say each chunk of the text, concentrating on conveying the meaning rather than repeating exactly. This can help to increase both reading speed (by chunking and reading in sense groups) and comprehension.
Besides these pedagogical considerations, teachers also need to think about variety and maintaining students' interest. Texts are a staple part of classroom language input, but if they are always treated in the same way, they can make lessons quite dull. For this reason, it is best to vary the way they are initially processed by mixing 'cold' silent reading with prepared individual or group reading, teacher reading and tape recording.
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