Reading Aloud as a Technique for Developing Teachers’ Awareness of English Phonology

This paper describes an exploratory qualitative study that is part of a larger research project into the impact of experiential learning on teacher proficiency and practice. It focuses on how, through a process approach to developing and evaluating their own oral skills, trainee teachers at the National Institute of Education in Singapore became more aware of features of spoken language that relate particularly to reading aloud in class. Such awareness is important because when these teachers enter school, they will work with primary school children and follow the Strategies for English Language Learning and Reading (STELLAR) program, which takes a shared-book approach and involves both teachers and students in reading aloud activities. This paper demonstrates how increasing awareness of features of their own spoken English and reflecting on the implications for reading aloud helped the teachers improve their own delivery and relate what they had learned to the classroom. Reading Aloud in the Development of Literacy The primary literacy education task of preschool and early school years is not teaching children letter-sound correspondences but reading to them. If a child is experiencing difficulty in learning to read, we should not ask if he or she knows the sounds of letters but if he or she has been read to extensively. (Moustafa, 1997, p. 78-79) The importance of being read aloud to in the development of literacy has been extensively documented (Fox, 2008; Krashen, 2004; Trelease, 2006), and promoted through national literacy initiatives such as Becoming a Nation of Readers in the U.S.A. or through the National Literacy Trust in the U.K. A short article by McQuillan (2009) summarizes the benefits of being read to. These include learning the purpose of reading, exposing learners to different text types and to vocabulary and language patterns not part of their everyday repertoire, helping learners to imagine, and laying the foundation for good writing skills. Of particular relevance to this discussion is that it also enables learners to hear the phrasing, inflections, and expressions that good readers use. While much of the research has focused on reading aloud in the child’s first language, in today’s multicultural world, many children come to school with home languages other than the school language. Similarly, children are learning foreign languages at ever-younger ages (de Language Education in Asia, 2014, 5(1), 117-128. http://dx.doi.org/10.5746/LEiA/14/V5/I1/A09/Hanington Language Education in Asia, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2014 Hanington Page 118 Lotbiniere, 2011). For such children, being read to in the new language may be a critical aspect of their literacy development. Being read to is not just for young children, however. Krashen (2004), for example, reported a study showing that college students benefitted from listening to stories and then discussing them, while Amer (1997) found that learners of English as a foreign language who were read to outperformed their counterparts on reading comprehension tests. Given the importance of being read to for learners of different backgrounds and ages, ensuring that teachers have the skills to read aloud effectively can be seen to be an important aspect of their professional development. At the word level, teacher readers need to be able to decode written language and recode it as spoken language just as their students do. This means being able to translate graphic representations into sounds, which in English means understanding sound-spelling relationships and word stress patterns. Resources such as the phonetic alphabet and dictionaries can further help native and non-native speaker teachers alike with the pronunciation of unfamiliar words. Reading aloud effectively goes beyond the word level, however. Above all, it requires the reader to have understood what is being read and then to parse language meaningfully, stress relevant words, pause at appropriate points and for an appropriate length of time, and maintain the rhythm of the target language. Peha (n.d.) outlines some further skills effective readers employ when reading aloud, such as changing pitch, volume, rhythm, and tone. All these elements are subsumed under the term phonology as used in this article. A final and important consideration is that language teachers, whatever their teaching context, are expected to be good models of the target language; they are still in many cases the primary, and sometimes the only, standard models their learners hear. Background to the Study Singapore is a multicultural country, and there are four official languages: English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil. Education is conducted in the medium of English, but children entering school have varied levels of exposure to this language through their home or preschool backgrounds. In addition to different home languages, the use of colloquial versions of English, broadly categorized as Singlish, means that some may have little exposure to Standard Singapore English outside school. The primary school English Language syllabus is delivered through the Strategies for English Language Learning and Reading (STELLAR) program. This program was developed based on research in Singapore schools and “is designed to cater to a diverse range of EL learners in our school system” (Ministry of Education, 2012, para. 4); under STELLAR, “EL is taught through stories and texts that appeal to children” (para. 4) with the goal of building confidence in both speech and writing. As part of the program, both teachers and students read aloud target texts. Throughout school, reading aloud is also used to assess students’ oral skills; for example, the critical Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) Oral Communication paper includes reading aloud. The diversity of the students’ language exposure outside school underscores the need for English-medium teachers to be role models of good language use. Indeed, the expectation is that “school leaders . . . must set high standards of spoken English for the whole school” (Wong, 2011, para. 7). As one way students are expected to demonstrate their skills is by reading aloud, this too is something teachers need to do well and model in their lessons. To help improve teachers’ language awareness and their own language skills, in 2009, a supplementary program, the Certificate in English Language Studies (CELS), was introduced for students on diploma or degree courses at a university in Singapore. This program is for those training to Language Education in Asia, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2014 Hanington Page 119 teach English in primary schools. It aims to help develop the English language content knowledge and skills of the participants. The primary focus for the skills enhancement component is a two-week intensive program which is followed by a series of personalized tasks. This intensive program takes an experiential approach to learning (Kolb, 1984) and models process approaches (Tompkins, 2010) that teachers are expected to use in school. Through the process of developing a digital story (Ohler, 2008), participants first write and record a script. Using a process writing approach to composing the script helps increase their awareness of their writing skills, while preparing the recording is an opportunity to focus on aspects of phonology. The program has been discussed from the course tutors’ standpoints in Hanington, Pillai, and Kwah (2013), and this discussion inspired a qualitative study into the impact of the approaches used on the course on the participants’ learning the next time it was conducted.