Group Read-Aloud: some indications

Listening to literature being read aloud is one of the most valuable and pleasurable experiences beginning readers and writers can have. Read alouds should be part of every child's day.
Story time, circle time, and read alouds offer a chance to model good reading and thinking strategies and to expose young learners to a rich variety of literature. When this exposure is accompanied by supportive and engaging discussions, children are able to extend their world view and develop important critical thinking skills.

The following are some helpful hints that will help you make the most of your read aloud time.

• Plan enough time for each session (15-20 minutes)You'll want to give yourself and the children enough time to read aloud, to enjoy, and to discuss the story, poem, or information text.
• Choose stories or texts that respond to audience's interests and experiencesFor very young children or emergent readers, choose books with vivid pictures, a strong story line, engaging characters, and evocative language. Humorous and predictable books are particularly successful.
• Preview the book before you read it with the group so you can anticipate questions or reactionsPractice reading the book through so you can decide where to pause for emphasis and where to elicit questions, predictions, or reactions.
• Introduce the book to the groupPoint out the cover illustration, title, and author. Invite the children to predict what the book is about, and talk about how the book might connect to their own experience or to other books they've heard or read. You can also give a brief explanation about why you chose to read the book. "This is the story of a boy who goes on an unusual trip. I chose it because you just came back from a trip." Or "This is the story about a special friendship between a mouse and a whale. I have read this many times. I wonder what you will think about it."
• Read with expressionLet your voice reflect the tone of the story or the personalities of the characters. Don't read too fast. Vary your pace so you can pause for emphasis. Allow time for children to think about what's happening or what might come next.
• Build in time for listeners to respond along the wayAllow time for children to study the pictures as you read, make comments, and ask questions about the story.
• Encourage predictionsAsk children what they think will happen next. Help them confirm or revise these predictions as the story unfolds. Try to honor many ideas and interpretations, not just the "correct" ones. Instead of accepting or rejecting comments or ideas as right or wrong, use comments such as "That's one possibility, let's see what the author has in mind." or "Well that's an interesting idea. How did you think of that?"
• Watch your audienceWatch the children's expressions and body language and be sensitive to signs of boredom or confusion. You may need to change your reading plan, change the book, or do more preparation next time.
• Save time at the end of the story to get reactionsAsk open-ended questions that don't have right or wrong answers and that can't be answered with a yes or no reply. For instance, ask what the child liked (or disliked) about the book and why. You may ask what he or she thought about the characters or how the problem was solved. Find out if the book made listeners think of any personal experiences or other books they've heard or read.
• Point out parts of the story you noticed or especially likedShow the children special language patterns or phrases or parts of the text that made you feel or visualize something. Ask children if there were other parts of the book they noticed.
• Remember that for some children, listening to stories is a new experienceSome children aren't used to being read to and will need to develop that interest and ability. Start with short, interesting stories with strong pictures. In some cases, allow active children to manipulate play dough or to draw while listening. Be responsive to facial expressions and body language.
• Encourage discussion about the storyAsk the children questions about what's going on and encourage them to predict what will come next. Be sure, though, not to turn the discussion into a quiz!
• Most importantly: Have a good time!

Article by America Reads

Wellbeing through groups reading aloud

Since the creation of the Epic of Gilgamesh some 4000 years ago, human beings have had a powerful technology with which to record, analyse, and explore their existence. I am talking about literature, which replicates more faithfully than any other man-made form the sense, structure, and feel of experience itself, while at the same time affording a safe distance from which to refract that experience. The ancient Egyptians understood this, inscribing “the medicine chest of the soul” over the door of the great library at Thebes.

In recent years, there has been a move towards integrating some aspects of literature into the medical and psychotherapeutic toolkit. Since 2001, The Reader Organisation in the UK has been pioneering Get Into Reading (GIR), with the help of colleagues from the Schools of English and of Medicine at the University of Liverpool, and with several Merseyside National Health Service (NHS) Trusts. The Reader Organisation is now training staff members and service-users, including the Chief Executive and the Medical Director of Mersey Care NHS Trust, to deliver weekly read-aloud reading groups, already pioneered in over 80 community settings. GIR is a simple intervention. Group members meet weekly for an hour or two, and just two things happen: a facilitator or group member reads aloud; the reading is broken up by conversation and response to the text. Our hypothesis is that reading literature aloud with others offers something uniquely valuable.

What does reading literature offer that reading a newspaper, chatting, knitting, dancing, or participating in a choir does not? As Maryanne Wolf has noted in Proust and the Squid; The Story and Science of Reading and the Brain (2008), reading literature offers exposure to “both the commonality and the uniqueness of our thoughts”. For someone in a depressive state to be (as Wolf puts it) “no longer limited by the confines of his or her own thinking” may in itself have a therapeutic value. Our belief in not giving group members targeted self-help books is the other major structural principle: what literature offers is the opportunity for people to discover a relation to the book rather than the book narrowly proposing it. Deeper, wider, and richer resources are offered within the broadly human realm than are offered through the medicalised “self-help” pigeonhole. The decision not to go for immediate and obviously “relevant” connections is related, I believe, to a need to get the brain functioning along different connections of pathways—the more difficult, the more rich, the less immediately relevant a text the more therapeutic it might be. If the connection with a book comes as a surprise, an active emotional discovery, there may be a more dynamically creative result. That is why the rule here is that the book matters in its own right in GIR, because, paradoxically, that is what produces a deeper effect on the reader. In GIR you can use your difficulties to imagine, to give and find sympathy and relationship.

Here is an example that I encountered at an NHS meeting. The speaker told assembled medics and managers that he had had a severe breakdown while teaching English in a desperately failing school. He was still suffering badly and did not expect to work again. He had found that the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins offered him, if not active help, then something like serious company. He said, “when things are really bad it helps to see that someone else has been there and hung on, it helps to see that someone has managed to get it in order”.

Jean Honoré Fragonard - La liseuse (1776)

Hopkins' poem neither changed nor expunged the experience, nor did it distract this man from it. No one would claim the poem was a cure, but it did offer recognition, solidarity, and perhaps a safe harbour.

Let me add some thoughts from my own experience as a reader. Someone reads out “O the mind, mind has mountains” and as the reading voice is registered in my mind I am already processing and expanding upon the content. In a split second I am checking with myself: does the mind have mountains? An image of a sheer cliff face flashes upon what the poet Wordsworth calls the “inward eye”; I remember being frightened on a scree slope somewhere on Snowdon when I was about 14 years old; I think fleetingly of my friend Wil who died in a climbing accident; I feel a vertiginous drop as I remember a time of extreme mental distress and almost feel that distressing memory as “fall”; I'm also registering the crying repetition of the word mind, “o the mind, mind”. I'm slowing this down and reimagining it in order to write it down here, but as it happens in real time I've barely registered any of this. That is why stopping to talk, as the reading happens, becomes important.

But such literature is a gift that it is hard for some to receive. The man in my example was a literature graduate. But many people have difficulties with literacy and not everyone has easy access to the great writing, ranging from Doctor Seuss to William Shakespeare, which we might want to call “literature”. Reading aloud can give immediate access to complex writing that might otherwise be at least daunting and at worst unavailable to a large section of the population.

It is worth noting that in the history of civilisation, the notion that reading should be silent and private, rather than communal and out-loud, is a fairly recent development. In his Confessions (AD 397), Augustine records with surprise seeing Ambrose reading silently, ‘“his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still.’” Voiced reading was the norm, creating a community of listeners: we return to that tradition in GIR but from within a culture where silent and private reading is now the norm instead. Reading aloud now offers experiences and benefits not available elsewhere.

Literary texts of the past 300 or so years, though obviously with an oral component, are for the most part not meant for oral performance. That means that reading aloud is much slower than reading done by the solitary individual in his or her head, and it demands not only a different sort of attention (translating from outside to in, from out there to my personal relation), but also calls for a greater attention to human detail unfolding in time. Reading aloud thus offers a counter to an over-busy world of visual scanning or ephemeral print.

The read-aloud model facilitates the creation of a series of powerful interplays: between the written text and the aural experience; between hearing the text from outside and processing it within; between one's own experience and that of the author and characters; between the privacy of personal consciousness and the public experience of group discussion. And always there is the group. For by reading aloud in a group it may be that readers experience what we might call interpersonality both with the book, and its author and characters, and with other group members. Group members have often reported a sense of the book itself as a voiced human presence in the group and at its emotional centre. To see oneself in others; to see others in oneself: this is the rich experience going on within the group and with the books.

For people who have become competent readers, and especially for those who have become readers of literature, such as our English teacher, reading is largely a private and solitary activity. Those who wish to engage with others through books (members of book clubs, colleagues meeting over the water-cooler, people taking literature courses) usually do so by having the reading experience in private and then talking about that experience or the ideas arising from that experience at the meeting or class. Especially when set against the utterly primal excitement that the reading experience can sometimes involve, this disjunction between having the experience and sharing the meaning makes much literary talk feel at best second-hand, and at worst, unreal. The reading-aloud group model offers something live: the sharing of the experience itself, the reading together, and also the immediate discussion of that complex experience in a social community.

“The mind does have mountains”, a group member may remark. “That's a great description of how it feels.” “Yes, I've been there”, another member may add—or not, if she chooses to remain silent. But the thought “Yes I've been there” will be registered even if the expression is not yet ripe. Seeing others grappling with difficulty, attempting expression, overcoming silence, using personal resonances, may be another “active ingredient”. Having the language, both verbal and syntactical, to describe complex experience may be a key component in developing the ability to survive mental tribulation.

Samuel Johnson wrote “The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.” 

Article by Jane Davies

from The Lancet

"Cosmopolis" by Don De Lillo

Un de mes meilleurs romans lus! L'auteur du récent "l'homme qui tombe" est une figure incontournable de la littérature contemporaine américaine, pour qui veut la connaître.
Je ne le connaissais pas jusqu'à présent.
Là, c'est chose faite, et avec délectation, j'ai beaucoup apprécié "Cosmopolis".
Avec l'étonnante circonstance de l'épisode KIERVEL de la SocGen, c'est avec grand plaisir que j'ai lu les turpitudes cérébrales du héros, un trader richissime de 28 ans qui, pour arriver au sommet, était plus que doué pour anticiper l'avenir .
Car c'est bien le thème du livre ; il s'articule autour de la notion du temps, thème favori des philosophes anciens comme actuels.
La thèse développée par le héros : l'avenir n'a plus de secret pour celui qui sait utiliser l'informatique, tellement les technologies actuelles permettent d'anticiper les cycles.
Sauf que "Cosmopolis", dés les premières pages nous précise : "pour tout sommet atteint, ce trouve une chute" ; toujours cette théorie des cycles.
Le récit se déroule sur une seule journée et il est ponctué d'événements et de dialogues (de très bonnes réparties de la part des protagonistes), qui s'enchaînent parfaitement.
Le style de l'auteur est tout simplement remarquable. C'est trouble, parfois obscure, noir, réfléchi, souvent pertinent, pas toujours linéaire, méandreux.
Don DeLilo mérite pleinement toutes ses récompenses décernées. Un de mes meilleurs romans lus, à ranger à coté des "Seigneur des porcheries", "Conjurations des imbéciles".
Je conseille, donc !

Book review by Claire P.