Reflections on reading aloud

Reading aloud in MFL has always been important, but with the changes to the new GCSE it has become even more so. I have been thinking about and experimenting with this a lot recently and wanted to share some reflections. 

I think about reading aloud as having 2 distinct stages or sub-skills: echoing and independence. To me echoing is about holding a sound in the auditory working memory and accurately repeating it back. This is an important first step to achieve before being able to be independent, meaning to be able to see a word and accurately say it. 

There are many activities that are about repeating TL words, chunks, and sentences, and I feel that much of what we do as language teachers is find many different engaging ways to repeat the same things, so students can adequately practice skills and vocab. This means that repetition tends to be quite gamified, for example choral repetition, and delayed repetition. 

This is ideally placed at the modelling stage. When I first started my EPI journey, one of the mistakes I was making was not giving students enough chance to speak at this first stage; they were getting a huge amount of listening practice but didn’t have an opportunity to get confident with actually saying the TL sounds. 

The ‘beat the teacher’ game is another good example (students repeat what you say, but you say it wrong they stay silent), and there are many variations – you could have words with pictures to reinforce the meanings, or sentences on their own. I believe a common way to increase the challenge is by removing the words and leaving just the pictures, but of course we need to consider that this changes the focus of the game from reading aloud to recalling items of vocabulary. I have also seen this game done with a short list of written TL chunks, with teachers saying either the wrong chunk, or mispronouncing the chunk when students get more confident. For example, I tend to use a variation of this when teaching French numbers in year 7, as a common misconception is the pronunciation of deux/douze and trois/treize. I write just these words in a grid of 4 squares, building up to mispronunciations like doo, ducks, troy, etc.  

When repeating, we need to remember that the working memory can hold 4-9 items depending on which research papers you consult, and so if we ask students to repeat more than this, they are not really repeating at all since they no longer hold the modelled forms in their memory; they will already be trying to work out at least some words independently, based on the written form.  

This is, then, the next step that we will want them to be able to move on to. Before we discuss this, we could consider a sub-step between echoing and independence: noticing. This could actually work as an assessment or pre-teaching tool to check students are aware of the sounds we want them to be aware of, and consists of them thinking about and noticing sounds without actually saying it. For example, we could ask students to highlight all the instances of a sound in a (written) text or ask them to write on mini whiteboards an example of a word containing the target sound. Below is an example of a ‘find the odd one out’ task. 

There are lots of ways we can gamify reading aloud to practice this skill independently. I typically start with Speed Reading, as this is a whole class task and allows me to get a feel for whether the class as a whole has understood (I discuss this further in my blog post ‘Three key principles for phonics teaching). I use the website Spreeder (https://www.spreeder.com/app.php) which displays any text I input at whatever speed I choose. The class read aloud what they see, and my groups find this task very engaging. Usually, I start with about 75 wpm and gradually build up, giving some whole class feedback between each attempt. 

After this, I would allow practice in pairs. There are a huge number of ways to practice this, and again, we need to consider what task type to use, to practise the skill we want to target. Some tasks are primarily about reading aloud, ie. mindreaders or trapdoor, and your students may find colour-coding key sounds is a supportive way to remind them about pronunciation (even just to remind them to think about pronunciation). You could choose to introduce the role of a referee to listen and check for accuracy. 

We need to give corrective feedback judiciously at this stage; I feel it is good practice to always consider what specific element is the most important. Depending on the age, prior knowledge and ability of learners, we will want to focus on a specific few sounds, particularly in French, so as not to overload them. Too many corrections at the independence stage will also decrease learners’ motivation, and they will naturally get better the more they hear and practice. 

On the other hand, other paired read-aloud tasks have a more communicative focus, ie. the ‘algo’ game where one student reads a transcript while the other student listens and writes the gaps in their version of the transcript. 

Still other read-aloud tasks for pairs, trios or groups include an element of practicing translation as well, for example pyramid translations, or no snakes no ladders game. These could be a good way to practice reading aloud in a more subconscious way, but I wanted to include a reminder that unless students are very confident with the sounds, they may be less accurate in terms of pronunciation while concentrating on other skills at the same time.