Reading Aloud: Breaking the Taboo

Robert Buckmaster, Latvia

Robert Buckmaster has worked in ELT since the early 1990s and has taught and trained in Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Romania, Slovenia, Uzbekistan and elsewhere. Currently the Director of Studies at International House Riga, Latvia, he was the British Council ELT Consultant for Justice and Home Affairs in Estonia from 2001 to 2006. He has an MEd [Distinction] in e-Learning and his work can be seen at www.rbuckmaster.com and www.englishideas.org. E-mail: robert@rbuckmaster.com

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Introduction
Reading aloud in real life
Reading aloud: the typical student experience
Reading aloud: text types
Reading aloud: CUPPP
Reading aloud: an example
Reading aloud: conclusions

Introduction

Reading aloud has long been proclaimed by many teacher trainers as 'something we just do not do'. I was reminded of this when I spoke to a participant in IH Riga's summer 2010 CELTA, after the course. When asked why we should not read aloud she could only say that she had been told not to. I also remember being told way back in the early '90s in my initial teacher training course that we do not read aloud. Yet I've observed many classes where teachers do ask students to do this, mostly with varying degrees of failure.

The taboo against reading aloud is like the mantra to decrease teacher talking time – a gross over simplification or just plainly wrong. What is important in teacher talking time is the quality not the quantity; unless the teacher really does have a chronic inability to keep quiet. Telling a teacher to reduce their talking time is an injunction. Asking them why they are talking is training. In reading aloud it is the way we do it which determines the technique's success. Do it well and it is worthwhile. Do it badly and it is very damaging.

This article will briefly examine if we do indeed read aloud outside the classroom, the student experiences I have witnessed inside the classroom, discuss the text types it might be useful to read aloud and outline an effective way to read aloud and work through an example.

Reading aloud in real life

After I was told not to read aloud, young[ish] impressionable teacher that I was, I didn't. Then I started to reflect on the reason for the prohibition, which boiled down to 'we don't read aloud in real life and so we shouldn't do so in the classroom'. A moment or two later I realised that indeed we did read aloud in real life and in fact I had engaged in it only a few years earlier. Before I became an ELT teacher I had been an archaeologist [think Indiana Jones but with a shovel and trowel instead of the whip and the gun; I had the hat]. During regular tea breaks we sat around on a sun-baked excavation in Canterbury shooting the breeze, boasting and bantering with each other. Sometimes one of us had bought a newspaper, the Sun or the Daily Mirror, and if we were reading it and something absurd or interesting caught our eye we would say something like 'Listen to this' and then go on to read aloud the article or problem page letter. Imagine that.

More recently, every evening I find myself reading bedtime stories aloud to my youngest son, Markus, and even listening to my older son, Alexander read aloud to me.

The 'because we don't do it in real life' reason does not even pass the laugh test. A better reason not to read aloud is because it is seldom done well, but then it becomes a matter of education rather than prohibition.

Reading aloud: the typical student experience

The reading aloud events I have observed boil down to the teacher asking a student to start to read a sentence from a text [followed by another student, usually in sequence around the classroom], without any preparation, then once the text has been read the students are supposed to answer questions on it. This is the centrepiece of an already flawed reading process, with no pre-reading tasks [e.g. prediction; activating schemata; pre-teaching vocabulary] and no during reading task [just wait for your turn to demonstrate your lack of competence]. Other occasions have shown students reading the instructions for a task to the rest of the class.

The student performance of the task, and we must remember it is a performance, has usually been marked by a halting delivery of mispronounced words and badly chunked text with the student struggling to encode the pronunciation and meaning of the text into comprehensible [remember the questions to follow] spoken output. This whole approach is setting the students up for personal failure and loss of face and is a jolly bad thing.

You might want to do this for some perverse diagnostic test to find out your students cannot successfully chunk the language and don't know how to pronounce certain words [though I already know they cannot do this successfully except at very high levels and I haven't even met them] but this is definitely not something to be done in public in front of their peers.

I can, pretty much, read aloud, sight unseen, everything that might appear in coursebooks, bedtime stories and newspapers like the Sun. This is because I have the enormous vocabulary and intimate knowledge of English grammar and pronunciation of a well-educated 46-year-old ELT teacher, who also happens to be a native speaker of the language. Students, at least the ones I've seen or taught, tend not to have these advantages. They are usually younger for a start.

If you are a teacher trainer, you can demonstrate this [or try it yourself], as I did recently, by asking teachers to read, sight unseen, an academic article from a scientific journal. This is the first part of the article I selected:

Bacteria possess several molecular quality control systems to ensure the fidelity of protein synthesis. The tmRNA•SmpB quality control system functions in all eubacteria to recycle stalled translational complexes in a reaction termed ‘ribosome rescue’. tmRNA (transfer-messenger RNA) is a bi-functional RNA that acts first as a transfer RNA to bind the ribosomal A site, and then as a messenger RNA to add the SsrA peptide tag to the C-terminus of the nascent chain [1]. SmpB is a tmRNA-binding protein required for both ribosome binding and translation of the SsrA peptide [2], [3]. The tmRNA•SmpB system serves at least two other quality control functions in addition to ribosome rescue.
[www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0015207]

I handed out the text and then asked the teachers in sequence around the room to take turns in reading a sentence aloud. The performance was that of typical students and I stopped them after four teachers had read because it was painful to listen to and they had got the message. The teachers who had read loudly protested that the others who hadn't should read too but enough was enough. Unless you have a Masters level education in the biological sciences then the article would not make sense to you and it would be impossible for anyone, I suggest, to successfully read it aloud and in any case it is not meant to be read aloud.

Reading aloud: text types

What then is meant to be read aloud and it is an important question? Bedtime stories yes, poems too; short newspaper articles and letters to a problem page, from my experience. I remember a teacher reading Charlotte's Web and Stig of the Dump aloud to us as we lazed in a rough circle on the spring grass in primary school. Fiction and plays can be read obviously. Speeches are also read aloud [where would Obama be without a teleprompter?] unless you just resort to a few words written on your hand to remind you of the points you have to make.

Some texts are not meant to be read aloud, as in my lesson to teachers described above, but others do lend themselves to it. I suggest that these texts are more likely to be short and more like spoken English in their vocabulary and grammar. So we're talking about the Sun newspaper, not the Times.

Reading aloud: CUPPP

So we have a combination of factors conspiring to make reading aloud a failure. We have teachers using the wrong text types [coursebook readings?] and, more importantly, asking the students to read something they do not understand [because they only just opened that page or looked at the text], which will include words they do not know and do not know how to pronounce. How then would one go about utilising reading aloud if you wanted to break such a long-lasting ELT taboo?

I suggest an approach acronymed CUFPPP, where CUF is for Complete Understanding First. I see absolutely no point in asking someone to read aloud something they do not understand. When I read problem page letters from the Daily Mirror to my fellow grave robbers [we were excavating a medieval cemetery] I had first read the letter to myself, understood it [I hope] and decided that it was worthy of reading aloud. Students need to have already dealt with the text so that they understand all of it: the lexis, the grammar, the pronunciation and the meanings that combinations of these provide. Only then will they be ready for the next stage.

The first P is for Preparation. Could an actor read Shakespeare unprepared and produce something worth listening to? Of course not and neither can your students. They need to check the pronunciation of words. To actively chunk the text into tone units. Decide which words receive the most stress. Decide on the intonation. Check that meaning will be delivered through their reading.

The second P is for [private or semi-private] Practice. Students need to have time and space where they can practice their performance.

The third P is for the [public] Performance itself, because reading aloud is, to repeat, a performance with an audience, with issues of face, and with feedback.

Reading aloud: an example

Here is an example of a lesson which is designed to help your students learn how to read aloud. The text is a Merrill Lynch advertisement from the '90s, which is written in a spoken idiom rather like a presentation or motivational speech.

If you want to see something done, just tell some human beings it can’t be done. Make it known that it’s impossible to fly to the moon, or to run a hundred metres in nine-point-nine seconds, or solve Fermat’s last Theorem. Remind the world that no-one has ever hit sixty-two home runs in a season. Stuffed eighteen people into a Volkswagen Bug. Set half the world free. Or cloned a sheep. Dangle the undoable in front of the world. Then, consider it done.

The way I use it is thus:

1. I tell the students I will read them a text. They have to listen to see what it is about and what kind of text it is. You might feel the need to brainstorm text types with your students before this.
2. Read the text.
3. Ask the students what kind of text it is and why they think so. Establish that it is an advertisement. Get them to think about what it is advertising. Tell them it is a Merril Lynch advert, though that's not really significant; but why would a financial institution use such an advertisement?
4. Give them sets of pieces of paper with either sentences from the text [easier] or phrases from the text [harder] cut up to student pairs. They have to reconstruct the text in order from memory.
5. Monitor/encourage/help.
6. Read again to help/check the text.
7. Students read the text for themselves. Let students use dictionaries or answer student questions about the language of the text.
8. Establish that the text is supposed to be motivational.
9. Collect the pieces of paper.
10. Give out a version of the whole text to the students. This version has phrases with the words mixed up in bold. Students have to re-order the words in the phrases, focusing their attention on word order.
    
    If you done see want to something, just tell some human beings be it done can’t. known make it that it’s impossible fly moon to to the, or to run a hundred metres in nine-point-nine seconds, or solve Fermat’s last Theorem. Remind the world that no-one has ever a season sixty-two runs home hit in. Stuffed eighteen people into a Volkswagen Bug. world free set the half. Or cloned a sheep. Dangle the undoable of world the front in done, it consider then.
11. Optional: Check by reading aloud again.
12. Give out a complete version of the text. Students use this to check if stage 11 is omitted.
13. Tell the students you will read the text again and they should mark where you pause and which words you stress most; explain why.
14. Students listen, mark and then check with each other. Read again if necessary.
15. Check the pronunciation of words.
16. Put students into pairs and tell them to practise reading the text in the most motivational way they can. They try to outdo each other.
17. Students read to new audience in small groups or to the class [depending on group size and motivation].

Reading aloud: conclusions

We do read aloud, well at least I do. Certain texts are made to be read aloud, others can be read aloud, some can't. Even if you are a very high level English user you still need to prepare to read aloud, at the minimum by reading and understanding the text first. Students need more preparation than this to read aloud because of the limitations of their language level and because we are aiming at reading aloud for success not failure. So remember: CUFPPP.

Please check the Methodology and Language for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Teaching Advanced Students course at Pilgrims website.