Gill Budgell

Reading aloud is a natural part of the learning to read process for young children.

Just as young children express their thoughts in speech, sometimes rather socially inappropriately, so they also read aloud to facilitate the process of decoding in the early stages of learning to read. They learn to respond to a written letter with a sound and to say this sound out loud then helps them to make the association between grapheme and phoneme. When they then try to blend a series of sounds to read a word; to decode that word, then again it is crucial to hear those sounds. When they begin to read decodable texts they begin to hear how words sound next to each other and cumulatively, and before too long they are beginning to appreciate the meaning of what they are reading and once this happens they are set to discover the world of reading.

As children become more proficient and we seek broader and more challenging opportunities for them to engage with texts of all kinds we deploy a range of reading scenarios; paired reading,  buddy reading, reading in a group, guided reading, reading round the class to name but a few. Children support each other in their reading development and may be teemed up with a similarly levelled reader or with someone more or less advanced; any of these techniques build on the importance of sharing and understanding.

We also begin to use a wider range of text types so we find that young children love to join in with a repetitive refrain within a picture book; ‘Run, run as fast as you can…’ for example but as children develop confidence we may introduce play scripts to encourage a different type of reading aloud which involves physicality and engagement with others. Similarly, if children lack confidence then short , chunked texts with parts of differing reading challenge can be enormously supportive for less able or reluctant readers; reading aloud for these older readers is still necessary and helpful and plays are an obvious way to encourage this. We may also introduce reading aloud for presentations and recitals and in so doing encourage a different sort of reading aloud confidence and sense of performance.

As adults we read aloud to children too. We model good reading with pace, intonation, stress and with a sense of audience so that children understand and mimic what it is to be a proficient reader and develop good listening skills alongside. At home there is nothing quite like a one to one read aloud at bedtime and in school we yearn for that ‘end of the day’ story time  or that next chapter in the class novel,  which is now so often hard to find time for. But equally, we now have options with some wonderfully inspiring audio books and eBooks which in many ways, but not all, serve a similar purpose.

So don’t dismiss reading aloud whatever your age or the age of the children you are teaching. The physical act of voicing your reading requires different skills from silent reading, and hearing a text read aloud (with or without visuals) requires quite different skills from watching a film or TV version of a book. Children need the full range of experiences as indeed we still do!