M A I N F E AT U R E
readers spoke impeccable English, some
Is reading
aloud
allowed?
Jeremy Harmer t a recent teacher-training
recommends reading,
repeating and rehearsing.
A 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
4 • Issue 65 November 2009 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Despite the fact that all of the
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