Every day, in thousands of classrooms, students are asked to read aloud. Some teachers use a free-for-all style, in which each student takes a turn reading a section. Other teachers use popcorn style, in which students invite each other to read. For many teachers, these strategies are the primary means of working through a reading text with students.
Teachers say having students read aloud is important practice for fluency and decoding. Teachers argue that this strategy holds students accountable for reading along with the class, as opposed to silent reading. Reading aloud increases comprehension because listening comprehension is generally at a higher level than silent reading comprehension. It also helps the teacher formatively assess students’ pronunciation, attention to punctuation, and inflection. Students love to read aloud and would rather hear a story out loud than have to read the story silently and independently. Having students read aloud is as American as apple pie.
But, upon further analysis, free-for-all styles and popcorn are not effective means of instruction. Instead, having students read aloud can backfire.
First of all, having one child read aloud at the same time is not good fluency practice. Effective fluency practice is leveled according to the student’s instructional level. The Read Naturally® fluency program uses a short oral assessment to assess each student’s fluency level. The class novel or textbook may or may not be at the instructional level for most of your students.
Good fluency practice uses modeled selections. The students are not the best model readers in the class. Poor reading students reinforce poor reading skills, such as inattention to punctuation, mispronunciation, and poor inflection. The more the teacher interrupts to correct student mistakes, the less fluency is practiced.
Good fluency practice requires lots of reading aloud, including repeated reading. In any given reading, an individual student may read once or twice for a total of, say, one minute. Little practice to improve fluency.
Round robin and popcorn practice is bad decoding practice. Classroom novels and textbooks are not decodable texts. Real literature is full of sight words. In addition, students present different deficiencies in diagnostic decoding. Correcting a student’s mispronunciation of /ch/ in choir can only address the needs of one or two students. And correction is not an effective practice. Students need multiple examples, not isolated corrections, to improve decoding. The correction also does not improve the syllable skills.
Having students read aloud decreases reading comprehension. Jumping from one student to the next interrupts the flow of the selection. Reading comprehension depends on the connection of ideas. Imagine watching a twenty-two minute episode of The office with thirty different five-second commercials interrupting the show. Comprehension would obviously decrease. In round robin, students often anticipate where they will start and practice silently, thus losing understanding.
Not all students enjoy reading aloud. For some, this activity is the most dreaded classroom activity. Poor readers lose self-esteem when they are asked to read aloud. Peers can be ruthless and cruel. Too often, teachers use turn-rotating or popcorn styles to “catch” inattentive students, further disrupting fluency and comprehension and only serving to humiliate students.
Instead of turn-rotating and popcorn styles, why not use strategies that are appropriate to the teacher’s instructional goals? For fluency development, use a differentiated fluency plan with diagnostically assessed leveled selections with teacher read-alouds or exemplified stories on CD and repeated practice. Or at least use choral readings or echo readings to provide some model. For decoding practice, use phonics worksheets assigned according to students’ assessed diagnostic needs. For reading comprehension, use specific guided reading comprehension strategies with the best model reader, the teacher, as a coach. For the formative reading assessment, protect the student’s self-concept and the accuracy of the assessment by reading one at a time periodically.
