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Anonymous Posted 12 years ago
Speech & Pronunciation

Reading out-loud

Needed some advice. my training is as a bilingual elementary school teacher. I have had many esl classes... I now live in Italy and I find myself giving private lessons .I currently have a student who has baffled me. While he seems to understand and speak at quite a good level. I discovered he is completely incapable of reading out loud and understanding anything. For example: He will read a paragraph with a fair accent but when I ask him about what he has read, he needs to go back and reread silently. I am afraid he is mentally processing everything in italian and then coming back to me with his translation back into english. My concern is that he is not thinking in english and I am having a hard time getting him there. Again his english is not bad. He can hold a fairly good conversation.... but this reading business is strange... or is it?
  

Top answer

The same thing happen to me in my own language. Trying to read aloud for an audience (even if it is just an audience of one) distracts terribly from meaning. It is a common phenomenon and should not worry you.

— Mister Micawber

  • The same thing happen to me in my own language.
  • Trying to read aloud for an audience (even if it is just an audience of one) distracts terribly from meaning.
  • It is a common phenomenon and should not worry you.
  • The only reason to have a student read aloud is to check pronunciation and surf for words they do not know.
  • And you cannot force someone to think in L2—it happens very rarely indeed; many reasonably fluent L2 speakers translate all their lives.
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1 Answers
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The same thing happen to me in my own language. Trying to read aloud for an audience (even if it is just an audience of one) distracts terribly from meaning. It is a common phenomenon and should not worry you. The only reason to have a student read aloud is to check pronunciation and surf for words they do not know.

And you cannot force someone to think in L2—it happens very rarely inde
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