Keith Polette
“Speak the Speech”: Teaching Children How to Read Expressively Expressiveness of oral reading and individual interpretation of text constitutes the core of personal response. Delivery, tone, pitch, and volume become components of expression as the reader strives to share the emotion of the text. Personal interpretation results in individual response as the meaning one derives from the text gives rise to the emotional effort behind the oral interpretation of the text. —Marjorie R. Hancock, A Celebration of Literature and Response Children are, for the most part, energetic beings who love using words. To listen to them at play, for instance, is to hear language bubbling and bristling with life. Such language is immediate, brimming with vigor and vitality. The language of children is nearly always an essential act, one painted with bright emotional colors and textured with the grit and grain of specific, self-selected purposes. Even though children, especially young readers, may speak dynamically, they are limited in what they say by the number and kinds of words they have internalized (Beck, McKeown, & Kugan, 2002; Fox, 1999; Gee, 2017; Vygotsky, 1978; Willingham, 2017). If we want children to internalize rich language, that is, language that has the tang and density of lived experience, we will succeed if we to teach them how to translate that dynamic quality of their expressed language from speech to print, from the way that words are spoken spontaneously to the way that words are read aloud deliberately. In other words, if children don’t hear and speak new words and new sentences (and new rhetorical forms: paragraphs, poems, stories) in vigorous and robust ways, they will not mentally digest them. When children make this transference with practice over time, they will come to infuse what they read aloud with those same urgent energies that they use when they speak (Rasinski, 2014). In this way, they will find that reading aloud is an authentic and potent way to discover, create, and express meaning. When children repeatedly read fluently and expressively, they will necessarily internalize the language of the texts they are reading (Beckman, 2018; Goodman & Goodman, 1994.) When children in the elementary grades (and even those in the middle and high school grades who struggle with reading), read aloud without thorough preparation, however, we often hear one of two things. Some children, who are effective at decoding, will often read a text as quickly as they can, and even though they read without any hint of expression, they tend to get most of the words “right.” Other children, who lack decoding skills, will frequently stumble across the page, without expression, until they haltingly reach the end of the text. As we listen to so many children read with expressionless voices, we might wonder: Where is the energy and vigor that punctuates their voices when they speak at play? Where is the emotion? Where is the meaning? Where is the fluency? Where is the vitality and the intentionality?
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