Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Reading Aloud Thrill
To me this is a tried and true strategy, which is not used to its fullest at this time of instant gratification. The ability to hear text, poems, or prose read to you gives you deeper meaning to the feel of the text. Some of it is in the way a person speaks or accents the vocabulary. There are so many new words that you hear from some one reading and your understanding of the meaning of those words comes from how they are used in the work. I have always loved hearing poetry spoken and that carries over to books. I have gotten into listening to books on tape in the car as I go places. I love to hear different voices give life to novels and works I may have already read but have new feelings for when I hear new voice speak.
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I agree with you on all your points of the post. I used to have an extremely long commute for work and it was then that I started to listen to books on CDs. By doing this I was able to read many more books than I would have normally had time to read traditionally. This is also something that my wife and I do often. As we do a lot of traveling on the weekends. She will read a book aloud as I drive. You are right about how a poem and take on a whole new meaning when it is read aloud. As my wife is an English instructor, she shared a poem with me the other day. At first it seamed to be a poem about a man and his truck but then she read it to me and it totally changed in to a poem about a man and is lover!
ReplyDeleteI used this strategy at the beginning of each semester to determine the skill level of my students. I ask them to volunteer on the first day and almost every time they are the best readers. On the second day of class each student receives a slip of paper with an assigned text. No one knows the order but me and we read the first chapter of our text. Students cooperate for the most part and I get an overview of there reading ability. After the reading aloud they are asked to summarize the reading and this helps to measure comprehension.
ReplyDeletePersonally I read the Bible through yearly and the past 2 years it has become increasingly difficult to read it so I have recently started listening to the Bible of CD. It has helped with pronunciations and manage my time. Reading aloud is a great strategy in the classroom and for pleasure.
I am in complete agreeance with you. Especially teaching a foreign language, it is imperative that students hear text read aloud to them. There is no way they can practice correct pronunciation if it is not modeled for them.
ReplyDeleteMy senior year of highschool, my math teacher read aloud to us for 10 minutes everyday, until we finished a novel. It was so enjoyable and so rewarding, and I wish more teachers would model this behavior!