The Sunday Post on Ethical ELA is a year-long series featuring contributions from English language arts educator-scholars from across the country. In this series, we hope to expand notions of what secondary English language arts is, can do, and can be. Explore past posts on our “Teacher Ed” page.
Read Aloud! You’re Never Too Old for Storytime (or to Become an Expert Oral Reader) by Kate Sjostrom
When Glynis was in high school…her sophomore English teacher…read short stories to the class… [He] read the stories because he loved them and he believed the students would too. These were the most moving moments of Glynis’s academic life as an adolescent.
–Avi Lessing and Glynis Kinnan, “Against Measurement: Making a Case for School Play,” Unsettling Education
As someone who loves books enough to teach them, you likely experienced that magical school moment when a teacher brought a book’s world alive with their voice. While they read aloud, you might have lost yourself, resurfacing only when tears threatened or the bell broke the reading’s spell. That moment might have occurred on a kindergarten rug or, like it did for Glynis as recounted above, in a high school English classroom.
When I started working with middle and secondary student teachers, I rarely observed such moments of magic. Sure, I knew these pre-service teachers had their whole careers ahead of them, plenty of time to develop their oral reading craft, but I must confess that I was at first pessimistic. I’d get home, drop my bag, and complain to my husband and daughter that I’d just witnessed the life drained from my favorite books by parched voices. “They seemed bored!”
And then I had to face the fact that I hadn’t prepared these student teachers to do better. But how? In reflecting on my experience, I saw that I had picked up the ability to read well, at least in part, by listening to a good reader read. (My dad was a middle school teacher who enchanted me, my siblings, and his students with theatrical readings of The Hobbit and Where the Red Fern Grows.) I had also learned to be a better reader by considering my reading’s impact on others. (When a kid I babysit back in college had said that I didn’t read Flossie and the Fox as well as her previous babysitter did, you can be sure I stepped up my read aloud game!) Still, how could I use these experiences to help me guide the pre-service teachers with whom I work?
Gathering Read Aloud Resources
Upon further reflection, I realized it wasn’t true that I had never been explicitly taught or had never taught others to read aloud, but I also realized that all those experiences involved poetry, not fiction. One of my college professors had strong opinions on how to address a poem’s line breaks (subtly honor the break’s breath, but read to punctuation), and when I taught in a high school that participated in Poetry Out Loud, I taught my students his theory as well as to choose other places for breath and emphasis. (See John O’Connor’s recent English Journal article for description of a neat project that gets students reading aloud and writing about poems of their choosing.)
In my search for prose-specific read aloud tips, I found most useful the website of voice actor and novelist, Mary Robinette Kowal. Though geared towards giving formal book readings and recording audio fiction, Kowal’s series of how-to articles on reading aloud gave me many concrete tools to share with my students. Her article on narrating—with its attention to pacing, emphasis, and “wring[ing] the vocal description” out of onomatopoeic words—proved especially helpful.
Armed with these tips, as well as my understanding that we learn by listening to good readers and by considering the experience of listeners of our own, I created The Read Aloud Assignment.
The Read Aloud Assignment
To promote pre-service teachers’ (and my own) development in oral reading, I added the assignment below to my program’s reading methods course. It is geared toward teaching high school students but could easily be revised for a middle school focus. Note: To introduce this assignment, I start our very first class with a read aloud of my own, and I have found that the book I model with can make all the difference. I had especially good luck reading from my friend KT Mather’s debut novel, Rage is a Wolf,the first pages of which establish a super strong teen voice and challenge teachers to make school matter.
You will take a turn starting class by reading aloud 1-2 pages of a young adult (YA) book you think high school students will enjoy. Please do not pick a book typically taught in high schools; rather, find a newer book geared specifically toward high school-aged students. The benefits of this include:
- You will get practice using your voice and body to more deeply engage students in literature. (Be brave. Have fun. Try to hook us on the book!)
- You will have a chance to check out some of the great YA literature out there. (Here, too, stretch yourself; reach beyond the popular titles with which we are all familiar.) Bonus: At the end of semester, after being read to by your peers, you will have a list of YA titles you can recommend to students. Better yet, you will have a shopping list! You can look online or at book fairs for used copies of these books and start building your own classroom library, one that makes independent, high-interest reading more accessible for students.
Some Resources to Get You Started
- The YA book lists on Goodreads
- The teen page on Random House’s ReadBrightly website
- Chicago Public Library website’s “Teens” webpage
- The how-to articles on reading aloud from Mary Robinette Kowal’s website
Required Product
On the day of your reading, please submit a photocopy of your 1-2 pages, annotated for reading aloud. Use Robinette Kowal’s site and the model below for tips on how to make performance (not analysis) annotations.
A Read Aloud Culture
The semesters since I added the read aloud assignment to my course have been some of the most enjoyable in my teaching career. When we start every class with a short read aloud, we start every class in the magic of a good story, which helps us appreciate that the best engagement tools we have at our disposal are the very texts we teach. We also come to appreciate that a place where everyone can choose and share texts is a real reading community, one that’s just plain fun to be a part of. Granted, it is not always easy to face the reading stage, but we have grown in bravery, knowledge, and community together.
And as we—teacher and students alike—grow in read aloud bravery, there are so many fun and productive uses to which our voices can be put in the classroom. One of my favorites is reading novels aloud play-style, with the teacher as narrator and students as characters. I call this Highlighted Dialogue, as I highlight and distribute actors’ “parts,” and have found it to be not only a great way to help struggling readers get through texts but also a great way to engage students with texts far from us in time and place. For example, my high school students often missed the hilarity and inventiveness of Zora Neale Hurston’s characters playing the dozens in Their Eyes Were Watching God until they heard them.
Long Live the Read Aloud!
If we need to be convinced of the value of read alouds, for teachers and students alike, the evidence is out there. Thoughtful oral reading can improve critical reading; as we decide where to place emphasis or change our tone, we are identifying significant diction and shifts in the text. And research shows that listening to texts can improve fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, achievement, and motivation. To me, though, the most compelling evidence is the most obvious: it is the rapt faces of those listening to a good book read aloud well.
About Dr. Kate Sjostrom
A former high school English teacher, Kate Sjostrom is a lecturer and Associate Director of English Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the co-editor of Unsettling Education, a collection highlighting teachers’ work to resist standardization and center students’ humanity in the classroom. Her writing has appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Teaching/Writing, and the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. You can reach Kate via email at katesjostrom@uic.edu.
I really like this assignment and all the ideas in the post. If I were to give those preparing to teach English advice in the best way to prepare for read aloud it would be to take an oral interpretation class. OI both in high school and college taught me how to present literature aloud and how to always think about the listener/audience. Along w/ the presentation of dialogue, I like readers theater and having students turn prose into scripts and performances. My high school speech teacher’s first lesson was, “Don’t bore your audience. Give them a speech they will really like.” This should be the mantra of every teacher.