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Is reading aloud allowed? Jeremy Harmer recommends reading, repeating and rehearsing.
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t a recent teacher-training workshop in Bucharest, I handed out a text (see the box below) and asked the teachers to read it out, one by one, sentence by sentence. I wanted this first activity to start a discussion of what it felt like to read aloud. History, Karen Bailey used to tell her students before the whistle at Siete Vientos changed everything, is the random concatenation of states and events, nothing more. The job of the historian is to check that each of these happenings, each of the realities under investigation, is as unambiguous, as verifiable as possible, so that when describing the past, one could have confidence that one was telling truths, not weaving fantasies. This was the kind of way she talked, and she was thought of as very academic, very precise. But the stories of Siete Vientos and what happened there banished that style from her repertoire completely because it suddenly seemed to her that history, people’s histories, the history of a place breathed in the air and sticking to the rocks, is more than dusty accretions of sources and references.1
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Issue 65 November 2009 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Despite the fact that all of the readers spoke impeccable English, some of them stumbled over the words. One couldn’t pronounce a name, one got mixed up with concatenation and another found the last sentence of the extract almost impossible to read intelligibly, at sight. Afterwards, we discussed what they felt like, and it wasn’t good! Amongst other things, they were nervous, they didn’t understand what they were reading or why, and they hated the experience of not being able to pronounce things correctly in front of their peers, or of fighting to make sense of long, complicated sentences. And yet all they were doing was what has been happening in language classrooms all over the world for ages
I have never really worried about reading aloud before, but for various reasons it has suddenly become more interesting for me and ages – though, of course, I had specially chosen a text that would challenge even the most competent English speakers. The question that arises, therefore, is whether it has always been that bad for students, even with less challenging texts. And if it has, does it have to be? I have never really worried about reading aloud before, beyond feeling faintly negative about it, but for various reasons it has suddenly become more interesting for me. In the first place, I have recently observed it taking place when watching lessons – something which I haven’t seen for some time, despite many years of observation. Secondly, its value – or lack of it – became a point of discussion in a writing project where I am one member of a team. And finally, in the last few months I have read three articles on this topic, which is all the more remarkable since for many years hardly anyone talked about it at all. Sally Gibson, for example, explains the reasons why people have been against reading aloud, but argues for its many virtues. Costas Gabrielatos says
