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Reading books | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Books, Literature & Reading |  | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7196 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 1 of 7 16 April 2005 at 11:58am | IP Logged |
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Do you read aloud or not? Pro for reading aloud is it
engages speaking and listening skills. Against reading aloud is it's takes more time, and you may not pronounce every word correctly. Some people are quite fluent, but have poor accents. A friend of mine who is in that boat is working on his accent. His teacher says he's developed bad habits, in his case "a gringo accent". I know improving pronunciation is important to him, so it's not a case of him not caring, or being embarrassed of speaking well. I know others with terrible accents, though they are advanced. They can read complex books. Each has said or done things that me know they view their pronunciation is a problem. Again, it's not case of "don't want to", or "don't know it's a problem". So in the context of proper pronunciation, when do you think it's good to read aloud? If you want to add anything about your use of the dictionary, and if that seems to help or just slow you down. I.E. if you get the gist of what you are reading, do you generally just move on as Ardaschir mentioned in a posting? I ask that in the context of, is the effective strategy of a master of many languages also good for the beginner? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| victor Tetraglot Moderator United States Joined 7309 days ago 1098 posts - 1056 votes 6 sounds Speaks: Cantonese*, English, FrenchC1, Mandarin Studies: Spanish Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 7 16 April 2005 at 1:51pm | IP Logged |
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Let me add one more pro for reading it out loud. You actually absorb the material when you read it aloud, and the words that you don't know won't fly past you. You can either look it up or use Aradschir's method and let it reoccur. At least you know that you have seen the word.
"Not having a good accent" should not be a good excuse to not reading it out loud, especially when you want to. I think that most people are intelligent enough to tell if their accent "sounds right", at least to their ears. If it doesn't, they should fix it - keep repeating until they get it right. It will never get better if they don't even attempt this. Edited by victor on 16 April 2005 at 1:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7367 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes 12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 7 16 April 2005 at 11:53pm | IP Logged |
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Try to read books where you can find an audiobook where a professional reader reads the text aloud.
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| guillaume Pentaglot Groupie France Joined 7172 days ago 59 posts - 57 votes Speaks: French*, English, German, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Mandarin | Message 4 of 7 17 April 2005 at 1:22am | IP Logged |
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Well for the accents, I think you have a broad idea about what sounds right but when it gets to the fine points it's difficult to hear the difference between a perfect accent and your accent.
This is why I'd say reading a book while shadowing the audiobook is a very good way to absorb the text and practice the accent using the audiobook as a reference. As for luke's question, I'd say that using Ardaschir's method is even more important for beginners because it takes longuer for beginners to reach a very good level with their first foreign language and as such avoiding tedious tasks like using the dictionnary too much to read a book is very important. Somebody who masters many languages also has a better understanding of the many different meanings a word can take and that would have different words in another languages. So he is probably better armed too to read and understand well a dictionnary. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| zack Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 7200 days ago 122 posts - 127 votes Speaks: German*, English, Spanish, French Studies: Mandarin | Message 5 of 7 17 April 2005 at 7:28am | IP Logged |
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I agree that reading aloud in the target language helps a lot in deleloping proper pronunciation, particularly once you know *how* the words are pronounced correctly.
I find that even if I know how the words should sound and I can reproduce these sounds, I sometimes have difficulties reproducing them fluently in real time, ie speech at normal speed. My naive theory is that just like, say, riding a bike without wobbling around, fluently producing sequences of sound your speech apparatus is not used to takes a lot of practice. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7247 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes | Message 6 of 7 17 April 2005 at 9:34am | IP Logged |
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Amen to all the comments about using audiobooks. I have never heard any real argument against reading aloud before, only strong recommendations to do so. I echo this again and again and again, although I confess that I sometimes do not do so when I know that I should, not only because it takes longer, but because it wakes up the wife and kids. We have to take others into consideration. That said, language learning is inherently a noisy business.
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| evan Diglot Newbie United States evanosborn.tripod.co Joined 7159 days ago 20 posts - 20 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 7 of 7 21 April 2005 at 4:40pm | IP Logged |
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Interesting comments. I too have wondered about whether reading aloud was a good idea in general...outside the context of pronounciation. I think you can break down how people understand text into three areas:
(1) Reading alound and sounding out each word. (2) Reading silently while using your "inner voice" to follow along. (3) Reading in a purely visual manner. Starting by reading word by word and then evolving to reading phrase by phrase. I read a book about study habits which proposed that students should attempt to read without using their "inner voice" To break this habit the authors recommended repeating a simple phrase in your mind such as "What a beautiful day!" while you read. All in all, it seems that this advice is only geared towards advanced students interested in reading very fast and may not apply to language learners, especially those who are also working on pronounciation. However, the authors do seem to suggest that this type of exclusively visual reading is ideal. Edited by evan on 22 April 2005 at 2:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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