by Disinvestment Supporter

Created on: March 12, 2011   Last Updated: March 16, 2011

The traditional curriculum divided up skills and content between disciplines, rarely making explicit connections between learning from different classes. Math was only taught in math class, and math tests were only assessed to find out whether students had acquired math skills. Of course, there are few such restrictions in the adult world, and even traditional math tests were flawed by their own standards in that they were also inadvertently testing students' language skills. One of the few things that educational research has conclusively discovered is that students benefit when educators recognize interdisciplinary connections explicitly and plan for it in lessons and assessments.

Research on reading has similarly shown that students benefit most when skill sets are combined. The skills of reading comprehension, vocabulary development, writing, listening, and speaking are mutually reinforcing. The most successful attempts to teach children to read will incorporate all of these, more or less, at every level of development. In this context, reading aloud has taken on new meaning, both for its contributions to all these skills and for assessment value (i.e. students reading aloud).

Arguably, early childhood reading programs benefit most from reading aloud, and it should begin before students are instructed in how to decode written language. Comprehension skills benefit the decoding process in a few ways. Being able to determine context allows unknown words to be assimilated more quickly. Being able to predict and ask effective questions about what is being read allows text to be deciphered more easily. Modelling fluency in reading aloud gives students a stronger basis for reading silently by providing the example of what the internal voice should sound like.

Let's look at a few examples of ideal reading aloud activities supported by classroom research.

* The traditional read-aloud is the best known example of modelling. The instructor will have practiced the read-aloud beforehand and developed an effective introduction to catch student's attention. Children are exposed to tonal changes, the modelling of how to interpret grammatical conventions, and the speed required for fluency. When they later practice reading the same text themselves, either silently or aloud, they have a basis for comparing their performance, a guidepost to what is required. Studies have definitively shown that read-alouds, including those using parts of classroom texts for older students,

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