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← Reading Aloud Well

Reading Aloud Well

Three short lessons on reading aloud, to a child or to anyone: read it first yourself, stop to ask, and let the listener say it back. With free recorded books for the evenings you would rather listen.

Spark & Whetstone · sparkwhetstone.org/learn/reading-aloud-well · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Answers are at the end, so you can try each question first.

Lesson 1. Read it first

Read the passage once to yourself before you read it to anyone. You will know where the jokes land, where a voice changes, and where to slow down.

Then read more slowly than feels natural. Pause at the end of a sentence. A listener needs a moment to picture what you just said.

Question. What should you do before reading a story aloud?

  1. Read it once to yourself.
  2. Practise a different voice for every character.
  3. Check how long it takes.

Say it back. In your own words: why read it first, and why read slowly?

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Lesson 2. Stop and ask

With a young child, reading becomes a conversation. Researchers who developed "dialogic reading" (Whitehurst and colleagues, 1988) used a simple pattern called PEER: Prompt the child to say something about the page, Evaluate their answer, Expand it, then Repeat the prompt.

A prompt can be a question with a gap ("The bear went into the…?"), a "what happened before?", or an open "what do you see?" Keep it gentle, a few times a book, not every page.

Question. In PEER, what do you do after the child answers a prompt?

  1. Turn the page.
  2. Say whether it was right, then add a little to what they said.
  3. Ask a harder question straight away.

Say it back. Say it back: what do the letters of PEER stand for?

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Lesson 3. Listen, and say it back

Some evenings you will want to listen instead. LibriVox is a free library of public-domain books read aloud by volunteers, which you can play on any device.

Listening works best with the same habit as reading: stop after a chapter and say back, to yourself or to someone else, what happened. Large print helps if you want to follow along on paper.

Question. What is LibriVox?

  1. A paid audiobook service.
  2. A free library of public-domain books read aloud by volunteers.
  3. A reading test.

Say it back. In your own words: how do you make listening to a book stick?

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At the table: One book, two readers

Players: a grown-up and a child, or two grown-ups. You'll need: a picture book or a short chapter.

  1. The reader reads it once silently first.
  2. Read it aloud slowly, pausing at full stops.
  3. Stop twice to prompt: a gap to fill, or "what happened before?"
  4. At the end, the listener tells the story back in their own words.

Answers

  1. Read it once to yourself. — Reading it yourself first tells you where to slow down, change voice and pause.
  2. Say whether it was right, then add a little to what they said. — You evaluate the answer, then expand it ("Yes, a bear — a big brown bear"), and repeat the prompt so the child can say the fuller version.
  3. A free library of public-domain books read aloud by volunteers. — LibriVox is free: volunteers record books whose copyright has ended.