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Dive Brief:
- While reading out loud in the classroom can be uncomfortable for some elementary students, experts say listening to early learners read aloud is critical to understanding their fluency. Those who only read silently, for instance, might skip words they don’t understand or mispronounce others they think they know.
- Among techniques teachers can use to build students’ comfort are normalizing the idea of making mistakes, reading aloud as a class or with partners, and rereading familiar texts, said Carolyn Strom, clinical assistant professor of early childhood literacy at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.
- Some of the methods for encouraging reading aloud fall under the science of reading approach, revolving around explicit, systematic instruction focused on manageable parts of words, Strom said. These include partner reading, using “decodable” texts with familiar letter sounds, and an activity called “reader’s theater,” in which stories are turned into scripts and each reader plays a chosen role.
Dive Insight:
Normalizing mistakes is paramount to encouraging those uncomfortable with reading aloud, Strom said.
“We have a tricky orthography to read in, in English,” she said. “We’re going to make errors when we read, especially with multisyllabic words. It’s critical to remove the shame around them.”
Other techniques to reassure reluctant oral readers include choral reading — or reading as a class — or echo reading, in which the teacher reads a passage, stops and has students repeat it, Strom said. While the teacher might not hear individual students’ mistakes, students can hear how the teacher correctly pronounces the words or how their fellow students do so.
Similar to this would be partner reading, which “is great to do with parents, alternating and sharing the load,” she said. “It doesn’t just have to be you reading to me. … That can be a bonding experience for parents and kids, or from friends if they do partner reading.”
Rereading familiar texts, whether a passage from a book or a poem, can help make students feel more relaxed than a “cold read” of something they’ve never seen, as can decodable texts — those that only contain letter patterns that students already have learned, Strom said. And plenty of scripts are available online for reader’s theater activities, in which “kids have to go through and practice their lines all week, and then perform it at the end of the week,” she said.
No matter which technique teachers use, they should introduce new concepts or vocabulary words — especially tricky ones — at the outset, and make sure to monitor comprehension throughout the day by asking intentional questions, Strom said.
It’s important to keep in mind that students who don’t know letter sounds or aren’t recognizing words might not be ready to pick up a book and read out loud, Strom said. Teachers need to evaluate upfront by listening to them and employing a basic reading assessment.
“You know if they’re still at the word level, or whether they’ve moved on to sentences, or whether they’re at connected text,” she said. “If a child cannot read out loud on their own, we must make sure they’re read to.”
In employing the science of reading approach, “either way, reading out loud gets at the core idea of building fluency,” she added. “If kids can’t get past the decoding threshold, they’re going to have a hard time understanding what they’re reading. If they’re spending all their cognitive energy on decoding words, they’re not going to have as much [mental] space to work on comprehension.”
In working with those still at the word level, make sure they’re not just memorizing certain words, Strom said. “The whole point of reading out loud is to help them build their reading, sound out these words and develop automaticity,” she said.
For those who are ready to read out loud, in addition to word accuracy and reading rate, educators building fluency should focus on students’ prosody, or reading with expression, which includes things like accounting for punctuation and quotation marks, and rising into an excited voice when it’s appropriate, Strom said.
“Within the science of reading, when we talk about fluency, that can be accuracy, rate or prosody,” she said.
