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