Topic: Reading Aloud to Secondary Students

10-second review: Remembers when a teacher read aloud to the author and decides to read to her classes.

Title: “To Capture Those Captives: Read to Your Students.” Beth C. Paullin. English Journal (November 1974), 88-89. A publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Summary: Why read aloud to secondary students? You’ll read great literature and you will transport your classes into another world. The class will come together. You will have fun.

Comment: And you will present a model of how to read aloud and silently. Students will feel the emotion conveyed by the words on the page. The words will come alive. Students will increase their vocabulary. Words they would pass over when reading silently, they will hear and understand when read to them aloud. You will be introducing them to works they might not have wanted to read. You will tempt the students to want to read their own books. Read selections. Read whole stories. It’s a shared experience with your students that they are likely to remember forever.

A word to the wise: prepare and practice before reading aloud.

I still remember the expressions on the faces of the students when I read “Most Dangerous Game” and Faulkner’s “Two Soldiers.” The students read along. They couldn’t wait to learn if Rainsford would escape and, after I read “Two Soldiers,” some of my students looked up from the copy they were following with tears in their eyes. When the vocabulary was too difficult for the students, I read Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Boredom turned to rapt attention and thought. Dickens, when he read aloud on the lecture circuit, noted the reactions of his audience and said, “Now, that’s power.” RayS.

The purpose of this blog, English Education Archives, is to review articles of contemporary interest from past English education journals.