Reading Aloud
By Maryann Manning

Jan Patterson reads to a rapt group of third graders at Liberty Elementary School in Hoover, AL.

When I reflect on my years of classroom teaching, my happiest memories are of when I read aloud to my students. Like you, I had certain books I read aloud each year until I almost had them committed to memory. Flashbacks to those happy times in Nebraska often include Lois Lenski's Strawberry Girl (HarperTrophy, 1995, ISBN: 0-064-45850-0) and Cotton in My Sack (Lippincott, 1949).

I was having so much fun that I didn't consider reading aloud as teaching time. Though I knew then that reading aloud wasn't just a time-filler or something to do when students were cooling down after physical activity, now I know that my students were developing new vocabulary and building knowledge of the world as I whisked them away to exciting new places and helped them undergo new experiences and adventures.

As an expressive reader, I was aiding their oral reading fluency as they participated in my learning community.

Bringing books alive
I want to thank Jan Patterson, a third grade teacher at Liberty Park Elementary School in Hoover, AL for taking the act of reading aloud to her students to a new height. After hearing Mary Hahn speak at the MidSouth Reading and Writing Institute and reading Hahn's book, Reconsidering Read-Aloud (Stenhouse, 2002, ISBN: 1571103511), Jan decided to conduct a classroom research study on interactive read-alouds.

At different points in the book, Kensuke's Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo (Scholastic Press, 2003. ISBN: 0-439 38202-5), she would ask students to talk to their neighbor for 30 seconds about what just happened and what they thought might happen next in the story. She would also ask that the students compare typhoons in the Pacific with Hurricanes in Alabama and discuss what the word 'sodden' meant in the context of after the rain.

After the peer interaction, one or two students shared their thoughts with the class and Jan often expressed what she was thinking as well. I wasn't surprised that she thought her students were growing in their abilities to discuss books at read-aloud time, and the effects were permeating all of their reading. Thus began her study of the changes in oral and written responses to other books and higher order comprehension abilities such as making inferences, synthesizing and drawing conclusions.

Exchanging ideas
Students kept a read-along response journal by writing for five minutes following the read-aloud. In these journals, they were encouraged to write down their thoughts about the meaning of the text they read that day. Also, students participated in the ePals Classroom Exchange, an online discussion board that connected Jan's students with students from around the world who had also read some of the read-aloud books. Jan printed the online discussions so she could make notes about her students' messages. Jan recorded field notes from her observation of the students' oral discussions and the strategies she used during the interactive read-alouds.

Reflecting
Not surprisingly, Jan discovered a sense of excitement evident in the logs, postings on ePals and observations. Students sometimes vied for which one would be the first to reread the book independently. They also showed much interest in reading other books by the same authors.

Gender differences were noted in regard to oral participation, the amount and degree of enthusiasm expressed and the quality of written responses. In Jan's class, boys were much more verbal in oral discussion, while the girls waited their turn to comment and were often interrupted by the boys.

Not surprising was the level of activity for the boys while going to the rug and sitting down and the amount of movement they exhibited during the oral reading.

The girls wrote in much more detail and depth than the boys did. For example, girls wrote about the conflicts they personally had with characters from the books.

The boys complained a lot about having to write, and their writing did not reflect the same depth of thinking that they displayed in oral discussion. Some of the same boys who did not enjoy writing in their journals were nevertheless anxious to post their writing on ePals. The writing exhibited by the boys was much more detailed on ePals than in their journals.

Both boys and girls took more care with their writing on ePals because they thought other students all over the world would read their comments.

Jan was pleased that a number of students showed evidence of vocabulary growth. New words from a book were often written in journals and on ePal postings.

Helpful hints for reading aloud

• Choose good literature about subjects or topics that are interesting to your students.
• Share your ideas about how you understand the text as you read.
• Stop reading often so that students can discuss the inferences they are making.
• Demonstrate the strategies you want them to use.
• Help students connect with their own prior knowledge about the characters and/or content of the text (text to self, text to text, text to world.)
• Encourage monitoring of strategies that focus on meaning.
• Encourage students to ask questions.
• Ask part of the class to argue one point of view and present evidence about the view even if it isn't their own.
• Encourage follow-up research about topics and story settings.

Maryann Manning is on the faculty of the School of Education, the University of Alabama at Birmingham.