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برچسب: Aloud

  • Reading Aloud for Fluency: Celebration is as Important as Correction

    Reading Aloud for Fluency: Celebration is as Important as Correction


    Just waiting for the fun to start….

     

    Reading aloud both to and WITH students is one of the most important things teachers can do in reading class. Doing so helps build accuracy and automaticity in a way that silent reading can’t. And when students are socialized to read with a bit of prosody, to capture the intended meaning in their expression–we get double value because prosodic oral reading leads to prosodic–and therefore better–silent reading. This is a point Colleen Driggs, Erica Woolway and I make repeatedly in our forthcoming book The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading.

    But teachers are often reluctant to ask students to read aloud. They’re worried students won’t want to read or that they will struggle. Or they think they’re “not teaching” when students read aloud.

    Yes it’s important to build systems to cause all students to be attentive when read aloud happens. FASE Reading is a great tool for that.  Yes, it’s important to have a plan for student who will struggle. But it’s also important to understand that those are solvable problems. Especially if you are attentive to building a positive reading culture.

    A phrase we sometimes use is “celebration is as important as correction.” And you can see that clearly in this beautiful video (one of our longest serving in the TLAC library) of Hannah Lofthus.

     

    Hannah celebrates Cartier’s expressive reading beautifully: His classmates get to talk about “what’s so great” about his fluent prosodic reading. Hannah rewards him by letting him read a bit more. [Note that Cartier punches it up a bit on the second read; he knows he’s got it and he’s proud]. And then it’s Mahogany’s turn and she’s NOT going to be outdone.

    Yes, there is also correction and deliberate practice. Those are critical factors. But this video is a beautiful example of how we can make effective oral reading go viral in the classroom by attending to the culture of reading.

     



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  • The Power of Read Aloud & Come See Us in Denver

    The Power of Read Aloud & Come See Us in Denver


    Reading aloud to students creates the music of text for them…

     

     

    In mid-March we’ll be in Denver leading a workshop on reading.

    The workshop will incorporate content for our new book, The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading.

    One of the themes of the book is bringing the text back into the center of the classroom. When we read together, from a book, during class, often aloud, we can bring the text to life and make the story compelling, we can socialize students to sustain their attention in text, we can practice fluency if students read, and model it if we read to them.

    Check out these beautiful moments of Pritesh Raichura’s science class reading aloud—excerpted from the outstanding Step Lab documentary Great Teaching Unpacked for example.

     

    Or this montage—from the book—of Spencer Davis, Will Beller, Emily DiMatteo, Jo Facer and Rob De Leon reading aloud with their classes.

     

    Read Aloud, then, is a literacy tool that shouldn’t be overlooked, even among older students, we note in The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading.

    Some other key benefits of doing what we see Spencer, Will, Emily, Jo and Rob doing.

    Read Aloud can be an opportunity to share in, relish, and savor the beauty of books—one of the most joyful parts of the students’ and teachers’ day. It is also more critical to building fluency and preparing students to comprehend rich, complex texts than we originally understood.

    A good Read Aloud allows students to access a text well beyond what they can read on their own, enabling them to familiarize themselves with more complex vocabulary, rhythm, and patterns of syntax.

    Read Aloud also has the benefit of speed. A teacher reading a book aloud to students can cover more ground, more quickly, than the students themselves could if they were reading on their own, especially if the text is complex and challenging. In that case, the rate of exposure to key ideas, background knowledge, rare words, and technical vocabulary is accelerated.

    Teacher Read Aloud also provides a model of fluent expressive reading for students. It helps students hear what language sounds like when read aloud with mastery and develop a mental model.

    Developing such a mental model, will not only inform how students read aloud but also how they read silently. One of the core outcomes we seek as reading teachers is a sort of cognitive afterimage in our students when they read silently. We want their internal reading voice to be characterized by expression and prosody that bring the book to life during independent reading, thus enhancing meaning and perhaps pleasure.

    Some details that we love about the clips in the montage.

    • 90/110: Good read aloud is of done at 90% of your natural pace—providing students a bit more room to hear and process the words and information clearly but not so slow as to lose the story—and 110% expression—to build that mental model of expressive meaning making. You can hear that for sure in all of the clips
    • Check for Attention: We want students locked in and listening and often reading aloud themselves. So it’s important that they have texts out and are following along. Quick call and response checks that they are with you can help. Spencer, for example, pauses to say “We were specifically told….” And students respond “not to go past,” proving they are locked in. Rob does something similar
    • Circulate as you read: This lets you get near to students to observe them more closely and interact with them subtly if they need direction. It also somehow makes the reading a bit more dynamic.
    • Feed knowledge: Emily very quickly explains that the phrase “in league” means “teamed up with.” Jo asks students to clarify who ‘her father’ was in Othello’s soliloquy.
    • Shape Attention. It’s often helpful to give students something to “look for” such as “be on the look out for ways in which Squealer is scapegoating Snowball.”

     

    We’ll spend two days “close reading” dozens more videos of teachers in action at the Reading workshop in Denver. Come join us!  Details here: https://teachlikeachampion.org/readingreconsidered/mar2025

     



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  • Reading Aloud From Real Books To Build Fluency, Attention and Meaning

    Reading Aloud From Real Books To Build Fluency, Attention and Meaning


    Engaged, attentive students learning to read productively

     

    In our forthcoming book The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading, Colleen Driggs, Erica Woolway and I discuss the overlooked importance of shared oral reading of rich and complex literature in book form.

    This is a critical part of reading instruction for several reasons.

    1) It builds student fluency, which is critically overlooked. If students can’t read fluently, their working memory will be engaged in the task of figuring out the words and will not be available for meaning making.  Oral reading practice is critical, especially when it builds prosody, the ability to imbue text with meaning as students read it. Students learn what text sounds like from hearing models and this then influences the way they read silently.

    2) It brings the story to life in a group setting. Students connect with the book via that shared experience of reading it aloud together. THis makes reading class more meaningful and increases their motivation to read.

    3) They learn to sustain focus and attention while reading longer segments of text without break or distraction.

    4) They are exposed to books and read them cover to cover, a topic I have discussed frequently here and elsewhere.  Books are long-form complex arguments in which ideas are developed through deep reflection. A protagonist never thinks and believes at the end of the book what he or she thought and believed at the beginning. In an age when social media has normalized the “hot take”–one can understand a complex issue in a few seconds–the book is the antidote.

    With that in mind here’s a beautiful example of what the activity of reading aloud as a class can look like.

    In this video Christine Torres reads aloud from Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars with her fifth grade students.

    Notice how much fluency practice there is for students, but also how Christine combines this with her own beautiful (and carefully prepared) oral reading. Students develop a clear mental model of what the text should sound like. And it comes to life so powerfully, with students experiencing it together.  Notice also how student attention is focus and maintained via the shared experience of reading together. Students sustain their attentional focus in part because everyone around them is also doing so.

    It’s a beautiful and joyful thing and, happily, much more valuable to young readers than a 45 minute discussion of the main idea of a text excerpt students have no connection to and little background knowledge about.

     



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