Here is the recording of webinar I gave for #LDeduchat this week on ‘Why we need to read aloud’.
The prerecorded presentation lasts for about 25 mins with the rest of the time given over to Q&A.
If you can’t be doing with watching it, this is my basic argument:
- Too many children will not read independently because they are not fluent decoders.
- This is through no fault of their own: there is no correlation between decoding and intelligence.
- Reading confers all sorts of intellectual advantages: the more you read the more intelligent you will become
- We can overcome some of the disparity between fluent and non-fluent by reading aloud (this won’t address reading fluency, but it will provide non-fluent readers with the cognitive advantages of reading.
- Overcoming fluency is a separate issue which to begin to address in the Q&A but have written about here.
The slides I used are available separately here:
Baddeley, Alan. “Working memory: Theories, models, and controversies.” Annual review of psychology 63 (2012): 1-29.
Bell, Laura C., and Charles A. Perfetti. “Reading skill: Some adult comparisons.” Journal of Educational Psychology 86.2 (1994): 244.
Clark, Christina. “Children’s and Young People’s Reading in 2012: Findings from the 2012 National Literacy Trust’s Annual Survey.” National Literacy Trust (2013).
Coltheart, M., Davelaar, E., Jonasson, J. T., Besner, D., & Dornic, S. (1977). Attention and performance.
Ferrand, Ludovic. Cognition et lecture: processus de base de la reconnaissance des mots écrits chez l’adulte. Bruxelles: De Boeck Université, 2001.
Gernsbacher, Morton A., Kathleen R. Varner, and Mark E. Faust. “Investigating differences in general comprehension skill.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 16.3 (1990): 430.
Goswami, Usha, Jean Emile Gombert, and Lucia Fraca de Barrera. “Children’s orthographic representations and linguistic transparency: Nonsense word reading in English, French, and Spanish.” Applied Psycholinguistics 19.1 (1998): 19-52.
Kosslyn, Stephen M., and Ann M. Matt. “If you speak slowly, do people read your prose slowly? Person-particular speech recoding during reading.” Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society (1977).
Rubenstein, Herbert, Spafford S. Lewis, and Mollie A. Rubenstein. “Evidence for phonemic recoding in visual word recognition.” Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior 10.6 (1971): 645-657.
Scarborough, Hollis S. (2001). Connecting Early Language and Literacy to Later Reading (Dis)Abilities: Evidence, Theory, and Practice. In Susan B. Neuman and David K. Dickinson (eds), Handbook of Early Literacy (New York: Guilford Press), pp. 97–110.
Seidenberg, Mark S., and David C. Plaut. “Evaluating word-reading models at the item level: Matching the grain of theory and data.” Psychological Science 9.3 (1998): 234-237.
Seymour PH, Aro M, Erskine JM. Foundation literacy acquisition in European orthographies. Br J Psychol. 2003;94(Pt 2):143‐174. doi:10.1348/000712603321661859
Stanovich, Keith E. Matthew Effects in Reading: Some Consequences of Individual Differences in the Acquisition of Literacy, Reading Research Quarterly 22 (1993): 360–407; and Stuart J.
Westbrook, Jo, et al. “‘Just reading’: the impact of a faster pace of reading narratives on the comprehension of poorer adolescent readers in English classrooms.” Literacy 53.2 (2019): 60-68.
Sorry to be picky but there is no clear relationship between decoding and intelligence when learning to read but there is obviously a relationship between not being able to decode and intelligence later in life otherwise 3 makes no sense. I would just suggest making that boundary condition more explicit. It might not be obvious to people new to the argument. Also challenges misconception that IQ is static and won’t rise with education.
If you want detail, please feel free to explore the links provided 🙂
Thank you for an excellent presentation. I have a few questions:
1. What approach would you advocate for the in-class reading of complex ‘polyphonic’ texts such as Shakespearean drama? Would you recommend that the teacher reads aloud and plays all the parts themselves or is there a case of distributing the parts amongst the most able readers within the class?
2. If I am reading a novel aloud to a class without them ‘following along’ then how do I know that they are paying attention to the narrative? I have previously used the approach which I believe is advocated by Jo Facer in ‘Simplicity Rules’ which is to do the bulk of the reading aloud myself but to choose students at random to read a sentence or brief paragraph here and there in order to ensure that they are following the narrative. I suppose one answer to this is simply to pose effective comprehension/retrieval questions during the course of the reading, but is this enough to ensure engagement?
1. Watch a performance. Ideally, live theatre. If that’s not possible a filmed stage production is second best (there’s some great ones filmed at the Globe) and if that option’s not available, a filmed version. A teacher playing all the parts is obviously limited and rather than having the play mangled by students reading around the room I’d prefer not to read it at all. Teachers should read speeches and students should learn scenes and practice performances.
2.If you’re worried students aren’t paying attention, stop and ask recall questions. How do you know students are ‘engaged’ if they appear to be following along? As a teacher I knew who was likely to lose concentration and had strategies in place to support them.
Thanks for the blog. One thing I’m really curious about is if schools can ever make up for that practice that some students aren’t getting at home, either in primary or in secondary? It feels like a daunting challenge.
No, they probably can’t make up the discrepancies caused by home environments. What schools can do is try to prevent the gap from further widening (which is what tends to happen)
Not sure that’s a practical response to the contradiction between 2 and 3. Especially since a bit more clarity in the description would resolve it. For example ” Intelligence is not correlated to decoding but it is to comprehension likely with causality in both directions”. A statement like this is usually how it is cleared up.
Forgot to add that therefore not learning to read would correlate with a lower IQ later in life.
‘the fact finding game, maybe the benefit there is, you know, they all think you’re a legend or something’
Made my morning.
[…] Why we need to read aloud […]
[…] Why we need to read aloud […]