Why Reading Aloud to Middle School Students Works

Reading work seems to be at a new level in schools in recent years. Teachers understand the role of reading in its different modalities: reading by the teacher, reading by the student, shared reading, reading to present to others. Experts from https://bestessaywritingservice.org/  agrees that reading and appreciating a text, making sense of it, rereading, commenting, comparing with other readings, listening to what other people say about the same text, and broadening your view are actions that the school can develop with students in different age groups.

Teacher reading has reached "prime time" in many classrooms and is no longer seen as an unimportant activity, which is done if there is a little time left at the end of the day, or for another activity to be done. base on it. Reading is becoming a central activity of the class, occurs daily and, with this, teachers have shown students its importance. Children can know various textual genres, writers and their works, value different styles and appreciate quality texts, previously selected by the teacher, who shares with them the criteria of their choice.

Shared or collaborative reading - one in which students and teachers read together the same text and present their ideas and impressions about what was read - is intended, to teach reading, that is, create conditions for meaning-making strategies (whether related to the mobilization of reading skills, or the use of certain procedures and development of reading behavior's) to be made explicit by the different readers, thus enabling some appropriate strategies used by others, broadening and deepening their personal reading proficiency. "Shared reading needs to gain more space in school in order to give students a model of the reader (the teacher) and promote the exchange of ideas about what has been read.

What does reading fluency mean?

Student reading may be the modality that currently needs the most investment in school, in the sense discussed in this article. We often hear that the computer, television and video games are the biggest competitors of reading, and they are winning the dispute. There is a recurring complaint from teachers that students read poorly, do not read well, do not understand what they read, that is, they are not fluent readers. But what is reading well? What does the reader fluency mean?

Reading fluently does not mean understanding what you read, because you can read quickly without understanding the subject matter of the text. Reading a text requires students' knowledge of its purpose, as fluency also has to do with reading intent: what to read, which strategies to use, and what is expected at the end. And it is important to expose students to these purposes in each activity. We usually "take" a text always with an intention and it is not necessarily linked to the genre. That way, I won't always read literary works just to enjoy them. I can also read to do a study about the time of a novel, or to analyze the style employed by the author, or to profile the characters. We read news for various purposes, as well as informing ourselves. We can read to know more about another country, to broaden our knowledge on a specific subject, to study for a test, etc. This intention will determine my reading and my understanding of the subject of that text.

According to Antônio Gomes Batista, in Portuguese Literacy, Reading and Teaching: Challenges and Curriculum Perspectives, "for the student to read fluently it is essential that: have a broad domain of the relationship between graphemes and phonemes in Portuguese spelling; word identification process (...); be able to perform an expressive reading, which involves adequate attention to prosodic elements, such as intonation, emphasis, rhythm, apprehension of syntactic units ".

Therefore, we speak of reading fluency for students who have already conquered the alphabetical basis of the writing system, those who already master writing and establish relationships between graphemes and phonemes.

The reader who is still stuck to deciphering can hardly understand what the text reads about, as it does not use the most appropriate strategies for comprehension. It takes work to help you go beyond word-to-word or syllable-to-syllable reading to find other means of identification that make reading more fluent, using the deciphering and comprehension processes in parallel.

 Reading and rereading aloud helps improve text comprehension

Historically, reading aloud by students has served the school to gauge their performance in this activity, giving them a note of clarity and mistakes made - it should be a quick and effective reading, without stumbling. Reading at school was choosing the student "by surprise" without prior preparation, often without having read the text before. Standing, the student read for all to hear. The others kept watching so as not to lose the thread of reading, for fear of being next to be called and not knowing where their colleague had stopped. If there were conditions, students would memorize the text and only reproduce it at the time of the call, without reading.

Reading aloud for others to hear is a critical job of developing reading fluency, not evaluation. Define the activity, select what to read, choose how the reading will be done (in groups, individually, split by characters, passages, etc.), read and reread, rehearse the presentation, present to a smaller group (the group itself). class) to adjust some necessary aspects and, finally, to present to an audience what was planned.

Preparing for reading involves specific procedures that must be socialized and made explicit. By defining what each will read in the presentation, students can underline the excerpts to be read and highlight the last part of the classmate to know where they will start. One can do an individual essay, another collective essay, the presentation to the class and the retaking of the necessary criteria.

Reading and rereading in no way mean repeating several times what you read without seeing any sense, just to speed up reading and ensure fluency. The purpose of this activity is to favor understanding in order to emphasize certain passages or to choose the pace of the narration.

Soiree and dramatic reading are good activities for working fluently

There are activities that promote reading fluency and deserve space in the school: the poetic or literary soiree, the read theater or the dramatic reading of texts and the reading for any audio recording. These activities must be linked to projects or didactic sequences for their development.

Teaching projects whose final product is only a reading activity are still rare. We often see projects that involve reading, but the product is always a written production. And this is another important point to address: not every reading proposal needs to involve a writing proposal. Reading by reading is also a school activity and reading to introduce to others is a big challenge.

There are recurring practices of drawings after reading - whether they are the student's favorite passages, characters from the story, scenarios or outcome - as well as questions to be answered as "text interpretation". Reading practices become boring, meaningless for students who prefer not to read because they have to do a later task.

Among the activities that favor the work with reading fluency, soiree involves the choice of texts and the preparation of the presentation, considering an external audience. It can feature background music, presentations by various groups of people at alternate times, and should consider a single genre - for example, poetry or short story soiree.

Conclusion

Reading activities for fluency are not related to activities in which students need to memorize texts. Reading should be the core activity of the proposal. The preparation of dramatic reading should not direct efforts to make sets or costumes, as there is a risk of involving other aspects that are not related to fluent reading. It is the essay that must occupy a prominent place in this activity, as it is necessary to rehearse several times for the presentation to achieve its purpose. The intention is to ensure fluidity in reading and not to assess the student's ability to memorize easily.

Nor are they the dramatizations so often used in school. Dramatizing a text does not require much previous preparation, it can be done based on any genre and rely on improvisation. It seems to resemble staging, but the text is for reference only and is neither read nor decorated.

Working with reading fluency at school should gain a new look from teachers, aiming to promote varied moments and activities depending on the class, reading experience and age of students. Clear goals and objectives must be set in varying grades/years.

In general, reading activities should be present throughout schooling, starting with smaller classes, with daily readings and conversations about reading, in which students can socialize their interpretations and establish relationships with other readings. With the largest, the projects and didactic reading sequences appear more frequently, besides the permanence of the daily reading shared or by the teacher.

Working reading fluency at school is the challenge proposed to broaden students' experience with texts and to help them understand what they read, helping them to interpret and argue for their point of view. Working the argument is another point that needs to be expanded in schools, but this should be the subject of another article.