How does reading aloud help students to develop literacy skills?
/ Blog
Reading aloud to children particularly before they can talk is a vital element of literacy development.
It develops their skills for recognising letters, learn about the multiple story elements involved and understand that printed type represents spoken word.
A report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF) highlights the long-term consequences of low achievement in reading. It indicates that “Reading proficiently by the end of third grade can be a make-or-break benchmark in a child’s educational development.”
Let’s find out why is reading aloud important and exactly how reading aloud helps students to develop literacy skills.
Reading aloud picks out repetition
If you often use the same word or phrase twice in the same sentence, it’s considered clumsy yet often goes unnoticed unless read out loud. Take that last sentence for example. Chances are it passed muster when read silently, but read it again out loud.
Hopefully you stopped at the second ‘often’ thinking “Hello, that sounds familiar and a little clumsy.”
Make a habit of reading your written work aloud and you’ll quickly start to notice how those repeated words jump out. You can then edit your writing for a more professional result. In this case, you can change ‘often’ to ‘frequently.’.
Reading aloud highlights long, ponderous sentences
The unspoken word can be very forgiving to bad writing. Make your students read a passage out loud and its shortcomings can be stripped bare. Long, clumsy sentences sound awful out loud; clunky, meandering and weak.
Some writers use ‘and’ as a creative device to prolong a sentence to excruciating lengths and deliberately so. Bret Easton Ellis, controversial author of such novels as American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction, springs to mind; long paragraphs without a single full stop and a truckload of ‘and’s; paragraphs that tax the reader emotionally and are intended to do so.
Some view it as arty while others feel it’s lazy. Reading aloud precisely identifies this and helps students learn the importance of keeping it concise.
Reading aloud highlights pace
This follows on from the ponderous sentence thing. When you read aloud, you can hear if your prose is rising and falling as you want it to or just droning along in a sort of written monotone.
Make your students read it like they mean it and they will soon find out if their writing is energetic prose or needs improvisation.
Interested in finding out how to improve children's learning skills? Read in our previous blog post!
Reading aloud makes unreal dialogue believable
If you’re writing a story with dialogue, be careful about writing ‘real’ dialogue. It might be how we speak, but it’s not how we generally write dialogue.
As an exercise, record your students talking normally and get them to transcribe this into a written conversation. Notice how natural, real dialogue overlaps and loops and evolves in a pretty unstructured way.
You can’t do that in story dialogue. It has to flow, it has to go somewhere in a cohesive, yet believable form. And that means taking liberties.
Listen to others read their work aloud
Really listen. Sure, it’s not your work, but it is a way to make your work better as you hear the good, bad and ugly of their work. You can then take what you learn onwards and upwards to make your own work a more crafted, well written piece of personal genius.