In school, for the longest time, Elementary through High School, teachers would have you read parts of the book (whatever it was) aloud either to the class, to a small group, or even to yourself. Terrible fucking idea, and this is from someone who is a passable public speaker (basically I’m lucky enough to not be afraid of it). Every time, I was so locked in on making sure I didn’t cock up any pronunciation and made sure I hit the commas, dashes, pauses, line breaks, etc. that I didn’t have any time to actually understand the words as I said them. Instead, any extra time my brain had was devoted to timing and the actual act of reading, rather than absorbing or retaining.
But you might be like, how can reading to yourself be bad? You don’t have to worry about timing and all that since it’s just you! WRONG. You are still wasting precious time making that extra cognitive move to read, understand then actually say the words. Now here you are re-reading every sentence since you either read it or said it the first time, and now you have to track back and do the other action. Just let the kids fucking read or listen along and follow along. Don’t make us read
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I feel like most of reading aloud is trying to make you actually read it without giving the teacher extra work and also helping you with public speaking etc. Even if you forget the paragraph or passage you read out, reading it still helps with your speaking skills and I guess the idea is that eventually you will be able to speak clearly without a lot of effort.
I’m not a teacher but that was definitely my experience too as a student.
Maybe it’s an effective way to get everyone to –
focusshut up – they don’t want to talk over their friendIf you’re not reading aloud, it teaches you how to retain information that you hear, which is a very valuable skill.
If you’re the one reading, it teaches you how to pronounce things, and helps build confidence to speak in public.
It gives them practice saying words and structures that they wouldn’t normally. It’s not like they can never read silently if they are made to read aloud.
The issue is not doing it enough. Speaking aloud is as much of a skill as anything else. You are overly focused on trying to speak well because you are still green at the skill.
And anyways, reading aloud in the classroom is more about forced engagement than actually learning