Should We
Read to High School Students?
Should high
school English teachers read aloud to their students or play audio recordings
to them?
Over the past
several years, this practice has insinuated itself, Justin Bieber-like,
into our
consciousness. It seems to be showing up everywhere and it can be very
annoying.
Reading aloud to
older students definitely has a place, and yet it depends upon the purpose.
I know many
teachers use it like a crutch, reading to kids rather than requiring them to do
their own reading. It is easier that way, of course, but it doesn’t accomplish
some major instructional purposes.
Thus, if the
purpose is to ensure that students know Poe’s story, “The Cask of Amontillado,”
as a cultural
touchstone (“ooh, that’s the one where the guy gets bricked up in the wall”),
then reading it
to the kids should accomplish that.
Or, you could
just show an old Vincent Price movie.
The problem,
however, is that English teachers need to teach students to read
that kind of
text themselves, and make sense of it.
The hope is that
if students build the ability to read and interpret such texts
that they will
be able to do so later in college and in the workplace (though it would be a
pretty strange workplace that wants you to interpret dramatic irony in an
account of a homicide).
The problem is
that students won’t build that ability from being read to.
They need to
engage the texts themselves.
But, just
because I think the practice is misused by teachers, that don’t mean it should
be banned. What are some good purposes for oral reading in secondary English?
Here are a few:
1. Teacher reading (or the use of audio
recordings) can provide a model of what a text
should sound like. Thus, if my students were still building oral
fluency,
I might have them listen to a portion of the text, and then try to make
it sound
the same way themselves. Such modeling can play a useful role in fluency
practice,
even with older students.
2. There are times when the point is simply to
convey information.
Oral sharing of a text can be a practical way to accomplish that.
3. We are responsible for building students’
oral language as well as written.
It can be very useful to listen to the sound of the language for a
particular text.
Eudora Welty wrote about how important reading aloud was for her in
learning to write
and in appreciating the texts of others. Occasionally demonstrating this
power
to kids can be a great idea (though she engaged in it herself—and your
kids should, too).
4. Sometimes we have to balance efficiency with
our instructional purposes.
Teachers sometimes use their oral reading to speed things along, to
focus attention
or motivation, and to make a lesson fit the schedule. For example, a
teacher may have
the students reading and discussing a text for the first 40 minutes of
class,
but is not getting as far as she hoped. Consequently, she reads the next
section of the text
to everyone to complete the chapter before the bell rings. Or, in
another case,
the teacher reads the first 2-3 pages of a story to the students to set
the stage,
and then turns the rest of the reading over to them.
Nothing wrong
with those practices if they don’t displace too much student reading.
Unfortunately,
in my experience, such reading tends to be used because the kids are finding
the text to be
difficult or don’t want to read it.
Last week, I was
teaching a high school English class myself. I had the students read an essay,
and was
questioning them—and not getting very far, I must admit.
At some point, I
asked one young man a question about what the author said,
and he gave a
dopey answer. It was evident he hadn’t actually done the reading.
He either didn’t
read it or he read it badly. It was tempting to just stop there
and read the
essay to them to move things along, but instead I said, “You guys didn’t get
it.
Read it again.”
It was amazing how the tenor of the class changed at that point,
and in
retrospect I’m sure glad I didn’t read it to them.
Oral sharing and
video and audio presentations have their place
in the high
school English curriculum. But it is a small place, so teachers need to be
honest
with themselves
as to why they are using it. I think one way to protect against the weak uses
of it would be to simply set an arbitrary percentage of English class that will
be devoted to student reading (perhaps 40% or 50%--the teacher might decide
that if there are 250 minutes of class time per week, then students should
spend 100 minutes per week reading—not discussing, not listening to others
read, not writing, not waiting, just reading stories, poems, essays, literary
nonfiction, etc.
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