|
 |
Reading Aloud Technique | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4800 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 9 of 70 17 November 2011 at 8:07pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I read aloud the whole of the first Harry Potter in Spanish. It helped me focus on the words and seemed to make understanding easier. It was also good practice at pronunciation. Alice in Wonderland and the second Harry Potter book I read mostly in silence, and I'm now reading La Reina del Sur silently. But even so, when I stumble across a difficult sentence I have a strong tendency to re-read the sentence out loud. It still helps me untangle grammatically difficult sentences. Sometimes I will read aloud the same sentence three or four times before the meaning becomes clear.
Personally I think augmenting the visual nature of reading with the vocal production apparatus and then listening to the result gets the whole brain more involved in the process. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jdmoncada Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4969 days ago 470 posts - 741 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Finnish Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 10 of 70 17 November 2011 at 11:56pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I read aloud my short Japanese kanji reading passages. I find it helps me focus. It's the same way I would ahve done it as a child with my L1. Once I have it, then I do go back and try to reread passages aloud several times to make them sound natural. It's been read to help me really internalize the knowledge.
As an aside to a different point in the thread, I don't move my lips when I am reading in my L1. It is something I take for granted, but I remember being teased by the toher children when I was in junior high school because I didn't do it. They thought it strange that I just moved my eyes as I followed the line. I also happen to find myself better at being able to read a new text aloud while sounding natural doing it. It's true that not everyone can, and for a long time it puzzled me why others couldn't do it. (It was "I can. Why can't you?" logic.) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hypersport Senior Member United States Joined 5816 days ago 216 posts - 307 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 11 of 70 18 November 2011 at 12:46am | IP Logged | ||
|
Nice to hear how some of you use reading out loud. I too realized early on that reading out loud helped me focus much more on what I was reading. There isn't any room to do any simultaneous translating as your thoughts can't wander like when reading silently. Also you can't slip into your own natural accent when reading out loud, it becomes painfully obvious and you are forced to continue to pronounce words as they should be.
People who truly desire to be able to speak with natives at a decent level know that this is more speaking, and it's unlimited. Why wouldn't you do it? The more you speak, the better you're going to get. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5316 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 12 of 70 18 November 2011 at 12:55am | IP Logged | ||
Before I jump to any conclusions, would you care to elaborate on that please? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5946 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 13 of 70 18 November 2011 at 1:42am | IP Logged | ||
OK then, read this sentence fragment out loud and try to intonate it correctly. He picked up an orange [...] The problem is that "orange" could be the fruit (head noun), the colour (attributive adjective) or the flavour (a classifier noun) and there are several different intonation patterns possible here. No-one is going to be able to anticipate that from the context leading up to the word -- the answer is in the following text. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5946 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 14 of 70 18 November 2011 at 1:43am | IP Logged | ||
But surely you've met people who find it very difficult, even if only in primary school...? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hendrek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4817 days ago 152 posts - 210 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Persian | Message 15 of 70 18 November 2011 at 2:30am | IP Logged | ||
|
"But surely you've met people who find it very difficult, even if only in primary school...?"
Sure, it may fall back on preferred methods of learning, or even just overall amount of practice (i was read to a lot as a child and began reading relatively early). I'm only skeptical because of my own experience, so my skepticism is only based on an anecdotal n=1 analysis. As to the example above with the orange, could a large part of the answer not be correctly anticipated by the preceding text as well? If you start with a stand-alone sentence, as in your orange example, then there is nothing to anticipate, but if there's a preceding story, then likely the context would help somewhat, right? I think that's where the level of comfort in the language might play the largest part. When one is very comfortable (as in L1), it's likely easier to pick up on the contextual clues as one reads along, though they may be sparse, whereas in an L2, it may be necessary to read (or at least skim) through once prior to being able to anticipate, just depending on how comfortable one is. So, even with this anticipation aspect, I think there are likely to be errors made in reading aloud unfamiliar texts, so maybe it's a matter of how close one can get to the correct intonation on the first read, though it may not be likely to be done perfectly. Regardless of all of that, I personally find it helpful to read aloud for some of the reasons previously listed. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hypersport Senior Member United States Joined 5816 days ago 216 posts - 307 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 16 of 70 18 November 2011 at 5:00am | IP Logged | ||
|
Here's the thing Caintear, you're like a professional troll around here. In other forums they don't feed the trolls, they just ignore them. You on the other hand have a full time job here trying to nitpick stuff just to stir the pot, it's unreal. I gotta wonder how a guy has enough time in his day to 1, have over 4,000 posts and 2, come off as such an ignorant fool so often??
I already said that I witnessed kids in grade school that had trouble reading out loud in front of the class. Not that easy for everyone, but for most we had no problem at all. Maybe you're one of the few that can't read out loud very well, even in your native language. Hey, if that's the case, no big deal, but you gotta be kidding me? Are you gonna try and tell me that you can't see the advantages of trying to attain smooth natural speech by reading out loud in the language that you're studying? I can't even go there, you can't be that ignorant. Well maybe, because you're actually trying to have me read the sentence with the orange above prove some point that I can't anticipate...jesus. Reading out loud in your L2 is an exercise dude. We are trying to attain natural sounding speech that we can then replicate when we get opportunities to speak with native speakers. You know, so we don't have to hunt and peck for words. We're trying to get better. We're exercising the mouth, the accent, the pronunciation...we're speaking and reading at the same time. Quite the concept eh?? 4 persons have voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
