Do You Ask High School Students to Read Aloud?

I absolutely believe that one way to encourage and reinforce fluency and comprehension is through speaking and listening to language/literature, but in high school classes, I rarely do the traditional, round robin thing. Here are a few things I do:

I start the year by giving students a short piece of "nonsense" -- a bunch of fragments and words strung together by strange and inconsistent punctuation. They divide into groups, and it is each group's job to collect whatever props they might need, and to turn the "nonsense" into a short performance complete with characters and a short plot line. They all look at me like I'm crazy (which I may be) but by the end of the hour, we laugh and laugh as each group performs incredibly diverse, usually very humorous renditions that (SURPRISE!) make "sense." This is their first experience in my class of making meaning through oral performance.

Later in the year, I take one of the more obscure e.e. cummings poems, like "grasshopper" (or there is another great one about two respectable ladies giggling at church at a beauteous man), and they work as small groups to develop a performance of the poem that somehow makes "sense."

These poems work great, because even the most fluent readers initially struggle to make "sound sense," and they must work together to ascribe meaning to the fragments and invented "words."

The meaning that comes through in their final performances is often amazing, and often different for every group, giving rise to great discussions about reader response. It also makes them curious about what a "word" is, and how words came to have rather consistent meanings.

Something to try with less-fluent reader-out-louders whose nervousness may be contributing to their lack of fluency -- have them read a short passages out loud into a tape recorder. Then, have them read the passage silently, then discuss it with a partner. Have them go back to their recording, listen to it, and try to figure out where their reading doesn't match the meaning of the passage.

Then, have them work with their partner to read and record it again.

Maja Wilson

As a second year teacher, I am still figuring out what works and what doesn't for my students. I teach in a California high school that is struggling to get off the "at risk" designation of many standardized tests, especially in language arts. The language at home for many of my students is Spanish.

I think that reading aloud is invaluable. At the beginning of each semester, I get on my soapbox and state that I believe that one of my jobs as an English teacher is to help my students become more proficient readers, and that this includes reading out loud in my class. Reading is a learning process, and it includes making mistakes -- we don't learn otherwise. I also make it clear that anyone who laughs at or makes fun of another student for stumbling over a word or mispronouncing a word deals with me, and that experience will not be pleasant.

Taking my stand immediately really seems to lessen the tension about reading out loud in my classroom. Where else are my students going to have a safe forum to practice their reading skills?

Guidelines: Each student gets one opportunity to "pass" on reading per class period. Surprisingly, few choose to do so. We play "popcorn" a great deal: I begin reading and I define the amount that each person must read (one paragraph, one page, etc.) I then say "popcorn" and a student's (usually a more willing reader to start) name. That student reads and then calls on another student. A student may pass once. Everyone must read before we repeat readers. We pause every couple of readers to check understanding, vocabulary, etc.

What I've noticed is that my students will now volunteer to read, that some of my more struggling readers jump to read a passage, and that they help each other with words that they do not know, or can't pronounce, as they read.

Kathy H.

I use these ideas for teaching future teachers how to do read-alouds, but there is no reason they can't be used in the regular classroom. So here goes:

1. Have a purpose for reading aloud. One suggestion is to link up with a group of young children in an elementary school or day care and plan to read aloud to them. Other purposes would involve performing for the class or a larger group. Plays and poetry lend themselves well to this. We could talk about ideas for these another time, if anyone is interested.

2. Elicit from the students those qualities which make for an effective read-aloud, based on the idea that reading aloud is a performance. The list would probably include: rehearsal, voice projection, voice modulation, careful pronunciation, appropriate display of emotion, bringing the characters to life, maintaining good eye contact with the audience.

3. Have the students select something they will be reading aloud. Have them take it home to practice and/or let them practice in school. If you let them practice in school, you will need to find a space large enough for them to spread out such as outdoors, auditorium, cafeteria.

4. Have the students break into small groups to perform their read-alouds. Students who serve as the audience become peer evaluators using a scoring guide I developed or one that you design yourself.

Comments that will help reader to improve:

5. If possible -- and this is what I do with my education students -- have the presentations videotaped, then have the students take home their own videotapes along with the filled-out peer evaluations, review their own performances and write a self-evaluation report, using the scoring guide categories.

6. Go through the process again, using a different read-aloud and focusing the second self-evaluation report on improvement over the first (i.e., what did you try to do to make the second read-aloud better than the first, and how well did you succeed?).

7. Do the thing that was the purpose for learning to read aloud in the first place.

Howard Miller

OK. I know I'll probably be making some people mad, but here again is my two cents worth that I feel is worth a million bucks to my students. Its intent is to make you think about how you use reading aloud and its purpose.

Hearing every kid read and making them PERFORM are two different things that we need to be careful of. When you have a student read out loud how can you know that he/she is understanding what they read? All you can be sure of is that they know how to decode, but that is not comprehending text.

I have students who constantly stumble over words when they read aloud, and many would dismiss them as "poor readers." I want to stress again that this is because it is a performance and not a measure of their meaning and comprehension capabilities. These students are so worried about how they sound that no meaning is being made.

It is not because they don't know how to make meaning from text; it is because of the job asked of them. When they are allowed time to read it alone and then I ask them questions about what they have read, I can assess their comprehension levels. We need to be very careful of the difference between the two when teaching our students.

Yes, reading aloud does help with reading fluency which does help with reading abilities that leads to faster reading and comprehension. However, there are ways that this can be accomplished that take away the stress factor many lower level readers have. If they are to read out loud they should be given the opportunity to read it over first and, if possible, practice it before reading it to the class. There are many good exercises using choral readings, echoing, and repetition that can be done to help increase fluency.

Do you ever read anything to your students cold? I don't think so. So why do you make them do it?

My stand on literacy where reading is concerned is that I want them to be better comprehenders of text and to be able to express what they have read in their own words including their perceptions, emotions, and feelings whether it be in oral or written form. Reading aloud is not a goal, but a result of their progress in fluency.

Mary Weber

Reading aloud doesn't stop in high school. It continues into many English and writing courses. The motivations are, naturally, different from course to course and depend largely upon the instructor.

For my part, I use it as a tool to help students read -- see their own writing. Reading your writing aloud often allows you to find places where the writing "stumbles," or doesn't make as much sense as it should, or where punctuation is a bit iffy.

By the same token, hearing your work read by another person clues you in to the same types of weaknesses or interpretation problems. I use it as a workshop tool, or in conference, and just for those reasons.

More importantly, once they get past the initial shock, none of my students truly mind doing it. Everyone does it, and I've already stressed how I expect them to respond to each other in those environments and situations. I believe in encouragement, and most students feel very safe.

Rhonna J. Robbins-Sponaas