Thread by @Suchmo83

A thread on reading aloud while pupils follow along in their own copy of the text... 🪡

I sometimes come across confident claims that pupils following text as a teacher reads aloud is *a bad idea*. The Reading Framework seems to agree, though without any references to back this up:

But on what basis is this claim being made?

Primarily, it is an extrapolation from cognitive load theory that assumes pupils' comprehension will be impaired if they receive the exact same information in two modes (i.e. an example of the redundancy effect).

But there are issues with this assumption:

First, writing is not *only* speech written down (though this is a central part of what how English orthography works). Writing and spoken language are not merely two modes of identical information.

And even if writing *were* only speech written down, this wouldn't mean that writing couldn't offer clarity.

For example, the individual words in an unfamiliar phrase might be more easily recognised in print than in speech.

Second, evidence of this redundancy effect on reading is mixed. This effect may be mediated by the content, the learner's level of expertise and whether other visualisations are used also, e.g. diagrams (Trypke, 2023).

For example, Moreno and Mayer (2002) find evidence of the *opposite* of the redundancy effect in reading and listening simultaneously:

Third, even if we *did* see comprehension somewhat impaired when pupils followed a text and listened simultaneously, comprehension isn't our only consideration. It might well be the case that seeing words as they are read aloud is beneficial to pupils' decoding capabilities.

The evidence in this area is weak, but 'precocious readers' seem to learn the basics of reading this way (Olson et al., 2006). And there are scraps of evidence that watching TV with subtitles *might* support reading development compared to watching without (Linebarger, 2010).

To be clear, there seems to be some evidence that pupils following text while a relatively *dysfluent reader* (i.e. another pupil) reads aloud does elicit worse comprehension than just listening to a teacher read (Lynch, 1988). This should not come as a surprise.

All in all, I suspect that in some circumstances, following a text while listening to it read aloud by a teacher might slightly benefit comprehension and in other circumstances it might slightly impair comprehension.

I also suspect that there are benefits to pupils' orthographic development from this practice.

These positions align with the limited available evidence *at least* as well as the idea that following text as it is read aloud is simply a bad idea.

So if your classroom practice currently involves you sometimes reading aloud while pupils follow the words, don't be put off.

Of course, if this practice doesn't seem to fit for an individual pupil or class, then consider sensible adjustments.

The whole thread in a nutshell:

My hunch - and we don't have much more than hunches to work with at the moment - is that pupils following along while a teacher reads aloud might well be a useful part of a reading curriculum.