I really cannot fathom why anyone would want to or even enjoy reading out loud.
30/8/17 Wednesday – Read a recipe aloud while baking with the girls at home in the kitchen. Read a couple of poems aloud to get the rhythm and flow of them and try to understand. I work at home, my desk is in the living room so I mainly work while everyone else is out. Read out Google search results while discussing my son’s homework at the kitchen table. He’s 11.
(Mass Observer F43)
While anecdote or bus-stop chats can tell us that some people enjoy reading poetry from the top of their voice in the bath, that others read to their partners under the covers in bed and still others may read instructions in a whisper to get a grip on what has to be done and in what order, more traditional academic literature will tell us very little. A great deal has been written about reading aloud as a teaching and learning tool, an educational means-to-an-end (for example, Duncan & Paran, 2018, Pergams et al., 2018, Westbrook et al., 2018), as will be examined in Chapter 11. Oral reading also features in ethnographic studies – for example: Besnier’s examination of Polynesian language use and its religious practices as ‘between literacy and oracy’ (1995, pp. 116–39); Heath’s (1983) ethnography in the Piedmont Carolinas; Barton and Hamilton’s (2012) study of everyday literacy in Lancaster; and Mace’s earlier work on mothers and literacy (1998), and her later (2012) analysis of contemporary Quaker practices. This work provides us with important glimpses of contemporary oral reading but without a focus on examining the different forms of reading aloud going on in these contexts or on the particular purposes and powers of oral reading.
Quite a bit more popular and scholarly attention has focussed on parents and other carers reading out loud to children; for example, building on 2013 research, a 2018 survey by Nielson Book Research argues that there has been a decline in the proportion of parents reading to preschool children (Flood, 2018). The family literacy literature argues that reading to and with children is key to a child’s literacy (and wider language) development (see, for example, Brooks et al., 2008; Carpentieri et al., 2011; Vandermaas-Peeler et al., 2009). This body of work does not, though, refer to other forms of reading aloud that adults may be taking part in and how these practices may relate to what parents do with children. Similarly, while studies of book groups, book clubs or reading circles provide examples of some groups that choose to read out loud together (see, for example, Duncan, 2012, 2014; Jones & Harvey, 2015, 2020), these studies do not address adults reading aloud outside of these specific contexts.
Over the past few years, there has been a resurgence of media and popular attention to oral reading: from poetry and prose collections advertised as to be read aloud, such as A Little Aloud (Macmillan, 2010), Poetry by Heart (Motion, 2014) or Dancing by the Light of the Moon (Brandreth, 2019), to Michael Rosen’s popular Guardian article ‘Why reading aloud is a vital bridge to literacy,’ highlighting the benefits of continued reading aloud with children and teenagers (2019) and the development of the Read with Audrey initiative, an online community where users can read aloud to each other (Skarlatos, 2019). Two books published recently for popular audiences, Dimitri’s To Read Aloud (2017) and Gurdon’s The Enchanted Hour (2019), both encourage readers to take on the beneficial (they feel) habit of reading aloud to each other, though seemingly assuming that most readers will not already be doing this, while Williams’ (2017) study of reading aloud in the eighteenth-century home brought renewed attention to how reading may have been something a little different in the past. Williams and Dimitri were interviewed together on BBC Radio 4’s Books and Authors on the 26th of November 2017 (BBC Radio 4, 2017), further evidence, perhaps, of a reading aloud zeitgeist and providing a fascinating discussion. Yet it was a discussion about something done in the past and something that should (Dimitri argued) be done today. It was not a discussion of oral reading as a contemporary practice – something already done by many different people, in many different contexts, and for as many different reasons.
This means that though it may feel like more and more is being said about reading aloud in the media and popular discourse, it does not get us much further towards a sense of what adults today – in all different parts of the world – actually do and why. It does not add to wider conversations about what reading is or involves across adult life. I am arguing that the dominant conceptualisation of ‘reading’ in most of Europe, North America and much of the rest of the world is that of a silent, solitary activity. ‘Reading’ means silent reading; reading aloud is the form that needs specifying: the unusual, the exceptional, the weird even (Duncan, 2015; Radway, 1994). Historians of reading and the book tell us that this was not always so. Oral reading was once the unmarked form, with silent reading less common.
Vincent (2000) shows that mass literacy was only achieved during the nineteenth century, even in the industrial economies of North America and north-western Europe.1 Thus, for most of human history since the invention of writing there have been more people who could not read than could, and therefore more need for those who could read to read aloud to those who could not. Before the invention of reading glasses around the turn of the fourteenth century, even those who had once been able to read needed others to read to them once they became too long-sighted to read for themselves. The enduring tradition of Cuban cigar factory ‘lectors’ reading to rows of employees busily rolling cigars is one of the best-known examples of people reading aloud to those who may (or may not) themselves be able to read but whose hands were/are simply busy doing other things (Manguel, 1996; Tinajero, 2010). There are many other examples, though, including domestic scenes of reading aloud to family members doing needlework or shelling peas and the seventeenth-century French veilleé or German Spinnstube: spinning circles of young women or girls reading aloud to each other as they spun or knitted (Houston, 2002, pp. 103–4). Moreover, historians of the book (see, for example, Cavallo & Chartier, 2003; Eliot & Rose, 2009; Vincent, 2000) note that even after the invention of the printing press and the expansion of the market for published texts books remained expensive and often difficult to get hold of, especially before the spread of the lending library from the eighteenth century (Raven, 1996) and the arrival of cheap(er) paperbacks in the twentieth. Reading aloud, then, was also a way to allow many readers/listeners access to one book.
There are a great many references in classical and medieval sources to oral reading, so much so that some scholars (see, especially, Balogh, 1927; Hendrickson, 1929) have argued that silent reading was rare and that those who could read habitually did so aloud even when alone. This view has influenced and been repeated by many others. Manguel (1996, pp. 41–53), for example, asserts that reading aloud was the norm in the ancient world and that ‘well into the Middle Ages’ this affected the way in which texts were written and presented. However, other classical scholars, in particular Knox (1968) and Gavrilov (1997), not only rebut the interpretation of many of the key texts frequently cited in favour of the rarity of silent reading in the past – especially the famous passage in Augustine’s Confessions in which he describes seeing Ambrose Bishop of Milan reading silently – but also show that there are about as many references to silent reading in classical and medieval sources as there are to oral reading. Gavrilov (1997, p. 59) reaches a balanced conclusion on the controversy: ‘Reading to oneself was known to antiquity very early and was not felt to be something extraordinary. Nevertheless, because they loved the sonorities of language, people usually read aloud, especially with works of artistic literature.’ A recent commentator (McCutcheon, 2015) appears to agree with this.
Conversely, others show reading aloud persisting into the early modern period: Fox (1996, p. 132), for example, shows that authors read their books publicly in the seventeenth century, as Dickens famously did in the nineteenth, and Raven (1996, pp. 176, 199) suggests that although there was certainly some silent reading in eighteenth-century England reading aloud remained important in a number of contexts, including both public and private libraries. Yet even after this, as the above-mentioned Williams (2017) explores in relation to the eighteenth-century British home, Reay (2004) discusses in a study of nineteenth-century rural England, and the Reading Experience Database Project (2019) demonstrates in its diverse examples from between 1450 and 1945 oral and silent reading co-existed within households and families. Just as some people read aloud today, so others in the past read silently as well as aloud. There has, however, been a shift in the dominant cultural understanding of what ‘reading’ signifies: as argued above, while ‘reading’ once most strongly suggested oral reading, today in much of the world, it predominantly indicates silent reading. There has also been a corresponding shift in the conceptualisation of what it means to be ‘a good reader,’ with theorists agreeing on a late nineteenth-century move from reading as ‘articulation’ t...
