How to Learn to Read Aloud (1)

This is an English version of my previous post, 音読学習のあり方①. 

The easiest way to improve your grades is to read aloud.

As far as I remember, it was perhaps in the early 2010s when a famous teacher's catchphrase in a TV commercial for a certain preparatory school made the importance of reading aloud quite popular among high school students across Japan.

However, looking at actual high school students, it seems that the number of students who incorporate correct oral reading into their studies is still very small.

Reading Aloud in Junior High School English

Of course, reading aloud has been widely practiced in English classes in Japan even before the explosion of "reading aloud" caused by the prep school's TV commercials.
Especially in English classes in junior high schools, reading aloud is repeated over and over again because of the importance of phonetic instruction in the early stages of learning. There is probably no one who attended junior high school in Japan who never experienced the "repeat after me" instructions.

In the early instruction of junior high school English, the most important emphasis is often placed on connecting letters and sounds (and it was especially the case in the days before elementary school English began in earnest). Seeing the letters, converting them into sounds in the brain, and then relying on those sounds to capture the meaning of the letters ―― in order to be able to read English, one must be able to smoothly perform letter recognition and phonetic conversion. Reading aloud, especially "repeating after" a model voice, is an extremely effective practice to automate letter recognition and phonological conversion.

For this reason, in junior high school English, students practice reading aloud the dialogues in their textbooks to the model voice of the teacher or a sound source such as a CD. Teachers use a variety of different types of oral reading practice to help students improve their English.

Reading Aloud in High School English

In the late junior high school and high school English instruction, most of the English dealt with in class is not dialogues, but rather multi-paragraph passages. Because of the longer sentences, students do not have time to "repeat after" every single sentence, so a different kind of "read aloud" is required than in junior high school English. Even in high school, teachers assign various read-aloud tasks to their students, but the reality is that they cannot devote much class time to read-aloud practice because of the large amount of text and the many things to do in class.

Students "Read Aloud" on Their Own

Students cannot spend much time reading aloud in class, but they hear in various places that "reading aloud is important." Students who want to improve their grades will then read aloud on their own as part of their home study.

This in itself is a very good thing, but when I see students who work on reading aloud on their own, it seems that in many cases they read aloud on their own from the beginning and do not make use of model audio. Reading aloud without a model voice will significantly reduce the effectiveness of the reading practice. In order to improve your English ability (or performance) more efficiently, you need to be reading aloud correctly utilizing the model voice.

Read Aloud Correctly

The TV commercials by the famous prep school teacher stressing the importance of reading aloud have made reading aloud a part of many high school students' learning (or at least I see it this way). However, since only the catchphrase "The easiest way to improve your grades is to read aloud" has been used in the commercials, it seems that many students are engaged in self-styled reading aloud without much opportunity to understand the correct method of reading aloud.

I don't think that most of the junior high and high school students I teach today have ever seen the TV commercial I mentioned above. However, even they have heard about the importance of reading aloud in various places (including from me), and it seems to have been imprinted on them somehow. I suspect that many high school students are in the same situation as my students. I will therefore post a few articles regarding the correct reading aloud methods to help them learn to read aloud better.