Re: reading aloud

Ilda Carreiro King (kingil who-is-at bc.edu)
Wed, 31 Mar 1999 20:49:30 -0500

Although I consult with school districts on grade level strategies for improving reading in
general, I am channeled into working more cloesly with teachers as they try to teach those
who present the most challenge or resistance to learning from the methods used by the
teacher.

When working on fluency with students with the aim of producing less emphasis on decoding
and more emphasis on context and comprehension, modeling reading with expression and
attention to grammatical markings, what they mean for comprehension. makes breakthroughs
for many students. I can recall one student in a summer training program I conducted last
summer who turned to the teacher and said, "Is that what you want me to do?" Comprehension
increased dramatically once we explicity trained in oral expression of reading. In turn
training more competent peers to read orally with another less competent peer has been
helpful to both fluency and comprehension of the less fluent reader and gives kids more
practice in reading who need someone to hear them.

I taught a bilingual class (ages 8-12) early in my career and can't really remember what
techniques I used then specifically. I know I used a lot of drama though in achieving
comprehension - purposefully picking stories that could be visualized and represented and
acted out. AT diferent points, I had kids invent their own scripts based on well known
stories and then used them for both reading and writing tasks. That was in the 70s!

I would be interested in reading about the techniques you used in your study but don't have
the LCHC journal in the BC library. Would it be possible for a copy of the article to be
xeroxed and mailed to me? I would be happy to pick up the cost if this is possible.

Ilda

Mike Cole wrote:

> Thanks Nate, for the Vygotsky quote. I had totally forgotten it.
> Eugene-- only part of this work has been written up.
> Ilda-- Whether and when reading aloud can help a kid (and in general, I
> think reading aloud is more helpful to teacher monitor than student learner, but
> I will be happy to entertrain exceptions! :-)) depends, of course, on details
> of situation.
>
> However, for those interested, see 1992 LCHC special issue on the work on model
> afterschool reading activities and Moll/Diaz work on reading in English and Spanish.
>
> When we conducted our work on question asking reading (partially written up in a
> couple of places, including *Cultural Psychology* we had a number of kids who could
> read aloud in a "word barking" sort of way -- they were successful phonics decoders
> in a narrow sense-- but had totally lost the notion that what they were reading
> was supposed to be comprehended. QAL was one of four techniques developed to re-
> mediate such problems.
>
> In QAL, reading was silent. But whate was around it provided structure for discovering
> how to engage in that mysterious process called "reading to understand." As a routine
> demonstration to anyone who wanted to know why we did not read out loud (child,
> undergrad, visitor) we asked that person to read an unfamiliar passage aloud to the
> group. Then we would ask a few comprehension questions. Everyone, including this
> participant, would get caught up in correct pronounciations of unepexted words so that
> answering comprehension questions was really tough.
>
> The trick is to keep coordinated through the silence-- which is why we created a
> special coordinating structure.
>
> I suppose that in some circumstances, reading aloud could be useful for the learner,
> as Ilda says. I have only witnessed the opposite.
> mike