How to Learn to Read Aloud (2)

This is an English version of my previous post, 音読学習のあり方②.

In my previous post, I pointed out the current situation in which many high school students are not able to read aloud correctly.

• In Japan, learners of English including high school students are often exposed to fragmented information that reading aloud is effective for improving English proficiency.

• In high school classes, it is often impossible to provide sufficient oral reading instruction in class.

• As a result, many high school students read aloud in their own way without using model audio.

In this post, let me share with you what I think is the correct way to read aloud.

Reading aloud as imitation

When learning to read aloud, always use a model voice. After sufficient practice with the model voice, you may dare to read without the model voice, but the basic idea is to read aloud with the model voice first.

I tell my students that reading aloud is imitation, that the goal of practice should be to imitate the model's voice as exactly as possible. I also ask them to practice not to miss the rhythm and pitch (intonation) of the words as if they were singing karaoke. Just as it is impossible to learn to sing without using a model, so is it with reading aloud.

The basic practice of "imitation reading aloud" is overlapping. Repetition may be more appropriate, but I recommend overlapping because it is probably not practical for many high school students to stop and repeat all the sentences in their textbooks. 

Overlapping in a proper way?

When I observe students overlapping, I often see them vocalizing at the same time as the model voice. In order to emphasize the importance of imitating the sound they hear, I instruct students to speak two to three words later than the model voice (in the same way as in shadowing). Some students may drown out the model voice with their own voice by speaking too loudly. They should therefore be taught to focus on listening and use a lower voice for the first few exercises, and gradually increase the volume of their voice as the model voice becomes more and more retained in their brains.

Reading aloud as a review

Reading aloud is used as an exercise to review and incorporate the English sentences that have been learned. Sometimes, I see students reading aloud in "preparation" for a text that has not yet been covered in class, but I would like to tell them that it is not very meaningful.

The aim of reading aloud is to increase processing speed by repeatedly reading aloud the English sentences after you have fully understood the content, vocabulary and sentence structures. Since the goal of reading aloud is to increase the speed at which you can process English sentences, it is important to practice reading aloud along with the model voice. (It is also true, however, that many materials use model voices that are too fast for this purpose. We will return to this point later.)

Reading aloud to consolidate expressions

In addition to the review effect of increasing processing speed, reading aloud is also intended to help students retain words and phrases. By reading aloud repeatedly, we aim to anchor the learned words and phrases in the brain in the ways they are used in the text (i.e., in phrases and collocations).

In order for the learned words and phrases to stick in the brain, the students need to naturally memorize not only the written information but also the sounds (phonological information) as a set. When reading aloud on your own, only the phonological information of your own voice enters your brain, so it is much more effective to practice reading aloud using a model voice in order to repeatedly cement the phonological information of the model voice in your brain.

In this post, I have written about why model voices should be used for oral reading, which may seem quite obvious. In the next post, I will discuss the most important aspects that I want students to be aware of during oral reading instruction.