1) Why has reading aloud been discouraged in last three decades? What are the main objections against reading aloud (RA)?
Ra was not seen to be genuinely personally communicative and, combined with its often inappropriate use, this may have led to its virtual rejection by this methodology-good points and bad points alike. Probably the prime activitiy which contributed to the disrepute of RA is the practice of unprepared reading around the class-commonly perceived as an unimaginative and easy time filler for the teacher. Other objections to RA observe that:
- It is dull and boring, anxiety-provoking and of negligible benefit for the students. For the listeners, there is little to be gained from listening to a stumbling speaker.
- For the speaker, such is the working memory processing capacity required for decoding, recoding, and articulation that there is little room left for comprehension, yet RA is often used with the aim of comprehension.
- The linear progression of RA does not aid the development of efficient reading strategies (Klapper 1992)
- The requirement to focus on every word also slows reading speed and impedes the chunking of meaningful units (Eskey and Grabe 1988)
- Reading slowly (fewer than 200 words per minute), whether aloud or silently, interferes with semantic proposition formation (Grabe and Stoller 2002), therefore making it more difficult to understand what has been read.
- A frequently cited reasion for using RA is for the improvement of pronunciation. However, doubt is cast on the effectiveness of this by Celce-Murica, Brinton, Goodwin (1996) because of the controlled and therefore slightly unnatural texts that are often used; these do not necessarily help pronunciation in spontaneous speech. These texts usually edit redundancy, fragmentation, and incompleteness which feature in everyday speech.
- Students can be distracted by English spelling and make errors in the pronunciation of words they know orally (Birch op. cit.).
- Reading is usually a silent activity and it is often said that RA is not a skill that many people need; public speakers and boradcasters are in the minority.
- Reading aloud is a difficult thing to do well, even for native speakers, and this could be demotivating for students.
2) What are the possible benefits of RA?
It can help reading aloud by reinforcing graphemic-phonemic correspondences. It can aid the acquisition of prosodic features of English and help to develop writing skills by using it as oral proofreading. RA can also be used as a technique for autonomous learning and may help some anxious students to feel more able to speak.
Making accurate connections between graphemes and phonemes is vital in reading in order to speed word recognition and to help pronounce and learn new words (Stavonich 1991). Ra forces readers to make and practise these connections. In silent reading, learners might try to skip this process and so be less likely to understand what they have read because they have not been able to make semantic propositions effectively. Birch (ibid.) recommends reading aloud as practice so that the students have as much feedback as possible on their decoding skills. Students should read aloud prepared texts at the appropriate level to the teacher and to supportive groups or other individuals. RA can also help to develop reading fluency; Grave and Stoller (ibid.) suggest a variety of re-reading acitivites. Some of these involve RA, for example, paired re-readings, where students try to speed up their reading aloud by re-reading the same passage to each other for sixty seconds and try to get further each time.
3) How RA can be useful for pronunciation and prosodic features?
When a teacher listens to a student reading alou, he or she is often using the activity to identify more persistent problems of, for example, pronunciation, understanding of graphemic-phonemic connections, and so on, and is therefore using it as a diagnostic tool. It is the only way to check that these connections are being made correctly. Underhill (op. cit.) finds that RA can be a powerful tool for diagnosing a student's comprehension of the text. The intonation the student uses can indicate where understanding is not complete.
4) How can RA be useful for pronunciation and prosodic features?
Specialist books on pronunciation tend to concentrate on segmentals and the accurate production of specific sounds, and so only isolated words or, at most, single sentences are read aloud or spoken. However these books often include intonation practice and provide some longer texts to help this. By reading aloud longer stretches of text, prosodic features (which occur in spontaneous speech as well as RA) can be focused upon, with the aim of raising awareness of these and practising them so that the words flow in as natural-sounding a manner as possible. As with reading, L1 speech patterns can be transferred to the L2, which could interfere with clear communication. Chun (2002) uses RA for rehearsed speaking activities and to stabilize newly learned speech patterns. Celce-Murcia et al. (op. cit.) favour theuse of jazz chants to focus students' attention on rhythm and stress. Underhill (op. cit.), similarly, advocates that students should practise reading aloud traditional English rhymes to help familiarize them with stress-timed patterns.
5) What is the role of RA in reducing student anxiety?
RA can be used as a technique for autonomous learning and may help some anxious students to feel more able to speak. Although RA is regarded by some students as highly anxiety-provoking, Foss and Reitzel (1988) recommend it as a way of reducing communication anxiety. They have found that the group preparation work, evaluation and performance involved in this can lessen anxiety.
RA might be the only speaking that shy students will consent to do in class. Controlled, imitative activities can make students feel secure enough to make their first utterances. In this way, RA could help shy or unconfident students with speaking practice for a short while until they feel ready to speak more spontaneously.
6) What kind of a role does RA have in developing writing skills?
It can aid the acquisition of prosodic features of English and help to develop writing skills by using it as oral proofreading. RA has indirect role to play ni writing and it is likned to it via intonation. Chafe (1986, cited by Tench 1996) points out that whilst writing has no intonation, stress or pauses (apart from those that punctuation or italicization can indicate), it is very likely that both readers and writers do assign these features to whatever they are reading and writing. Thus, intonation can affect what is written, thether it is very near a spoken style (as in an informal email) or in a very formal formulaic letter. Many students at university find that they are required to read their papers aloud in seminars. They might have to use rhetorical structures different from those used in their L1 or native culture. They will also need to organize the sturcture clearly using discourse markers, and to reinforce this with the appropriate intonation so that the message will be understood easily. This might involve them in listening to their 'internal voice' as they write, or practising their intonation by reading aloud to themselves or friends before delivering the paper. As pointed out earlier, RA could be useful as a proofreading technique as errors might be more easily picked up with visual and aural inputs working together.
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