Sometimes, an English 097 or 099 instructor will send a text to be read out loud in my Learning Lab class. When I receive this sort of recommendation, I try to figure out why it was made and what it will accomplish. Quite often, the text to be read is short and is to be the basis for a writing assignment. In this case, I select myself as the best reader who can facilitate this task. I know all the words, or if I do not, have a very extensive repertoire of approaches to decode unknown words; I can read with meaning, giving inflection to key segments; and I can pace the reading, maintaining attention and leaving enough time for discussion or writing.
Sometimes, I have the suspicion that the recommendation to read out loud is made because that is what reading instruction is traditionally considered to be. Now, I cannot deny that elementary reading instruction is often centered on oral reading. So if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, then it must be a duck? Perhaps in elementary school. However, oral reading, especially sight reading on demand, is not a component of college reading instruction.
Admittedly, oral reading can help pupils decode text. The teacher is able to correct mistakes or pronounce an unknown word in a way which is helpful to the pupil. Reading along, that is reading a text with a teacher, can help a pupil learn how to form meaningful word segments, which might be sentences or phrases or individual words. Decoding is not, however, one of the topics taught in developmental reading courses.
One advantage of oral reading is that it may provide a valuable diagnostic assessment. In conjunction with some classroom instructors I have selected texts at different difficulty levels and then, in privacy, asked students to read the texts out loud. When they read, I noted words mispronounced or avoided, strategies used to handle strange words, and then asked about the content of the passage. This approach provided valuable information, but perhaps more than we could handle in the Learning Lab. The private, diagnostic oral reading of carefully selected texts showed that some students did not have adequate decoding skills and some did not have adequate comprehension abilities. However, it was neither possible to assign a text which the weak readers could handle nor was it possible to arrange for hours of additional instruction.
In my opinion, the diagnostic value of oral reading is probably lost in the classroom. When reading in public, the reader might not be doing as well as could be expected. And when listening to a stumbling, inaccurate reading, the listener’s comprehension is probably impaired. Oral sight reading by students in the classroom is not a valid diagnostic tool, and it is not a good way for them to grasp information.
Oral reading might have been the norm in earlier times. In his Confessions, St. Augustine noted that the bishop of Milan, St. Ambrose, read silently. This may have noteworthy since in a time when texts were scarce and literacy infrequent, it was probably the norm to read out loud for the benefit of others. But now things have changed. It is time to follow the advice of Edmund Huey from over a hundred years ago and downplay oral reading. “[O]ral reading was over-emphasized as compared with thought-getting, and that ‘saying it over’ was the reader’s ideal. Practice in abstracting meanings, in grasping the essentials of a page’s thought, has been little thought of in the reading lesson.” (302) We need to help our students get thoughts, not mouth words.
References
Augustine of Hippo, Confessions. Translated by Rex Warner, New York: New American Library, 1963.
Huey, Edmund Burke. The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading. Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1968. (First published by Macmillan Company in 1908)
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Maintained by Jay Howard,Sept 2003