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Reading Aloud vs Reading Silently

Reading comprehension

Silent reading and reading aloud

I’ve always distinguished reading aloud from silent reading in my teaching practices.  I rarely ask my students to read a text aloud. If I do, it’s only for only ONE purpose in mind: to practice pronunciation. Reading a text aloud develops the ability to read accurately, improves pronunciation, and trains learners to read fluently (the ability to quickly decode the text). An understanding of punctuation is also a skill that oral reading can develop.

I just don’t get why reading aloud should be assigned at all in ELT apart from the above reasons. Why does a teacher need to ask students to open the textbook and tell one of them to read a text on a certain page while the others are not necessarily following the reading?  Most probably, they might be daydreaming, even sleeping 🙂 In fact, the disadvantages of reading aloud outweigh the advantages. But this has to be empirically proven.

The disadvantages of oral reading

So let’s consider the disadvantages of reading out aloud:

  • Do the students understand the content when he/she reads aloud? I don’t think so. Students’ main concern when reading aloud is to struggle with the script and try to decode it. Little attention is paid to meaning.
  • The activity is done by one student. The other students are passively listening (if they are listening at all)
  • Students don’t understand the purpose of the reading-aloud activity.  They just read because they are told to do so.
  • It is a huge waste of precious time.

Meaningful oral reading activities

How to make it more meaningful?

  • While a student is reading out loud, the others are invited to CLOSE their textbooks!
  • Give the listening students a list of words on sheets of paper and tell them that they have to tick the vocabulary items that they hear.
  • Or give them a focus question that they have to answer while they are listening.
  • You might also try to give them a chart to fill while they are listening.
  • Another activity that you might use while a student is reading out a text loud is to tell them to rewrite in their own words what the text is about.

Of course, you can think of other creative ways. I would be curious to know how you use the activity in your class!


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