Reading aloud with
expression is a foundational
reading skill students should be developing
between grades 1 - 5. It is pretty easy to recognize when someone skillfully
reads aloud in an expressive manner. However, to effectively teach or assess
this skill, a closer examination of its features, development, and relationship
to other reading skills is needed.
What is Prosody?
Prosody, the defining feature of expressive
reading, comprises all of the variables of timing, phrasing, emphasis, and
intonation that speakers use to help convey aspects of meaning and to make their
speech lively. One of the challenges of oral reading is adding back the
prosodic cues that are largely absent from written language.
Why is Prosody Important?
Researchers have found strong links between
oral reading prosody and general reading achievement. For example, after
comparing students’ reading prosody in first and second grades with their
reading comprehension at the end of third grade, Miller and Schwanenflugel
(2008) concluded that, “early acquisition of an adult-like intonation contour
predicted better comprehension.” Another study, which included more than 1,750
fourth graders participating in the National Assessment of Educational Progress
(NAEP), found a strong correlation between prosody and overall reading
achievement (Daane, Campbell, Grigg, Goodman, & Oranje, 2005).
How Does Prosody Impact Reading Comprehension?
In the context of oral reading, prosody can
reflect linguistic features, such as sentence structure, as well as text
features, such as punctuation. Skilled readers pick up on these features, and
respond to them when reading aloud, as when they pause briefly at relevant
commas, pause slightly longer at sentence boundaries, raise their pitch at the
end of yes-no questions, and lower their pitch at the end of declarative
sentences.
While punctuation provides some cues to
prosody, young readers can be misled by it. For instance, they may pause at
every comma, even when the grammar of the sentence does not call for pausing
(e.g., “He made his usual egg, cheese, and tomato sandwich.”). As young readers
move toward adult proficiency, their pauses increasingly respect the grammar of
the text rather than doggedly following the punctuation (Miller &
Schwanenflugel, 2006).
Prosody can also reflect aspects of meaning.
For instance, slight fluctuations in pitch, timing, and emphasis can change a
simple question (e.g., “What did you do?”) into an expression of censure.
Learning to read dialog in a manner that reflects the intentions and emotional
states of the characters is a great way for adolescent readers to delve deeply
into literature. However, younger students may not understand this use of
prosody well enough to apply it to oral reading (Cutler & Swinney, 1987).
Notably, in the NAEP study, only 10% of fourth graders were judged as reading aloud
with this level of expressiveness.
Finally, when thinking about prosody, it is
critical to remember the other aspects of reading fluency: word reading
accuracy and reading rate. Inefficient word reading is the primary barrier to
good prosody for many young readers (Schwanenflugel, Hamilton, Wisenbaker,
Kuhn, & Stahl, 2004). Children who are struggling to decode individual
words tend to pause too frequently and for too long, so that their timing and
phrasing are seriously disrupted. Furthermore, they must put so much
effort into decoding that they do not have the mental resources left for
constructing meaning and conveying it expressively.
Providing Insight into a Learner's Reading
Ability
Listening to the prosody of a child reading
aloud provides parents and educators with a window into many aspects of reading
skill. By reading aloud with appropriate timing, phrasing, and end of sentence
intonation, younger readers can demonstrate their ability to:
· Read words accurately;
· Read at a reasonable
rate;
· Read most words
automatically, so that mental resources are available for comprehension;
· Use grammar and
punctuation to help construct meaning;
By reading aloud with increasingly adult-like
intonation and expressiveness, adolescent readers can demonstrate their ability
to:
· Use discourse-level
features, such as pronouns and signal words, to recognize relationships across and among the sentences in a text;
· Understand characters
and their intentions when reading fiction
· Understand an author’s
purpose or attitude.
Ultimately, all of these abilities must be
brought to bear to achieve the ultimate goal of reading with comprehension.
