Doug Lemov's field notes

Engaged, attentive students learning to read productively

In our forthcoming book The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading, Colleen Driggs, Erica Woolway and I discuss the overlooked importance of shared oral reading of rich and complex literature in book form.

This is a critical part of reading instruction for several reasons.

1) It builds student fluency, which is critically overlooked. If students can’t read fluently, their working memory will be engaged in the task of figuring out the words and will not be available for meaning making.  Oral reading practice is critical, especially when it builds prosody, the ability to imbue text with meaning as students read it. Students learn what text sounds like from hearing models and this then influences the way they read silently.

2) It brings the story to life in a group setting. Students connect with the book via that shared experience of reading it aloud together. THis makes reading class more meaningful and increases their motivation to read.

3) They learn to sustain focus and attention while reading longer segments of text without break or distraction.

4) They are exposed to books and read them cover to cover, a topic I have discussed frequently here and elsewhere.  Books are long-form complex arguments in which ideas are developed through deep reflection. A protagonist never thinks and believes at the end of the book what he or she thought and believed at the beginning. In an age when social media has normalized the “hot take”–one can understand a complex issue in a few seconds–the book is the antidote.

With that in mind here’s a beautiful example of what the activity of reading aloud as a class can look like.

In this video Christine Torres reads aloud from Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars with her fifth grade students.

Notice how much fluency practice there is for students, but also how Christine combines this with her own beautiful (and carefully prepared) oral reading. Students develop a clear mental model of what the text should sound like. And it comes to life so powerfully, with students experiencing it together.  Notice also how student attention is focus and maintained via the shared experience of reading together. Students sustain their attentional focus in part because everyone around them is also doing so.

It’s a beautiful and joyful thing and, happily, much more valuable to young readers than a 45 minute discussion of the main idea of a text excerpt students have no connection to and little background knowledge about.