As in my experience and as the article stated, the amount of read alouds dwindled as the grade in school increased. In all my English classes school memory, the teachers called on students who read with prosody to read passages outloud. As long as the teacher does not solely rely on students to read aloud, this is not bad. It allows the class to hear the passages with different voices. The teacher still can chunk the text so that there can be discussion on the thinking process that should be going on while reading. In my other classes, I do not have that many memories dealing with read alouds. I remember occasionally reading out of the science textbook, but only to glean information from it.
In the article, I thought it was interesting that the researchers did not define a read aloud. This allowed the teachers to elaborate on what "they" thought a read aloud was. I thought it was very fascinating that many teachers included reading directions and work sheets. This is NOT a read aloud. It is simply reading words out-loud. Promoting read alouds in a classroom and explaining WHY read alouds are so helpful is very important. I feel that my teacher classes at USM have taught me the value of reading aloud to my students. This will help them become independent learners.
One thing that I could not answer at first was how to incorporate read alouds into a band lesson. The article stated that the survey included band and choir classes. The more I thought about it, I thought of a few ways. The teacher could read an article about the composer or the type of music out-loud to the students. But how do they chunk the text to pause and have discussion on the thought process on an article of that nature.
In all the reading, one thought that kept occurring is "Read alouds are great, but how do teachers have time to do them often?" I want to incorporate read alouds to my class; my concern is that I will not have enough time to do this all the time. Time is precious and teachers never have enough of it in a day. How do you do read alouds in higher grades and still cover all the curriculum that is required?
PS: Here is a link for newborn baby marsupials pictures (Google images) :) ...they are tiny... and very pinkish red.
Abigail,
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with you that reading directions aloud for a worksheet should not constitute a read aloud! Why do you think the researchers chose not to define it? Do you think it could have skewed the results since the percentages included those teachers who considered that to be an effective read aloud? It would be interesting for us to see another study done that did clearly define the topic, and see if teachers scored themselves the same, or differently as before. Would the percentage decrease and cause us to be discouraged, rather than encouraged? Thank you for pointing out such an insightful note!