Remember how I recently mentioned that both my sisters and most of my students read aloud? Well, yesterday I came across an interested article in the newspaper called, “Silent Reading in Public”. The article says that reading aloud are physical characteristics of a young reader. As we learn to read, we slowly shift from reading out loud to reading only in our minds, and this shift parallels a shift in mind frame – from rote and imitation to invention and contemplation.
The author then talks a little about the history of text. In the ancient world, he claims, texts were read aloud because of the way they were written – there was no punctuation and often no spaces between words, which meant that the reader had to have prior knowledge to make sense of the text (which I can understand, since Thai script is as the author describes). The prior knowledge one needed was gained by having heard others read before; vocalization was a means to understand the text.
In “Confessions”, Augustine remarks that his mentor, Ambrose, was reading a book silently without even moving his lips. What Augustine recognized in Ambrose was a moment of “pure interiority, reading as entry into the contemplative world”. According to the author, “this marked a move away from authoritarian literalism to the imaginative autonomy of the intelligent reader”.
The author goes on to get even more philosophical – “truth has no meaning apart from its meaning in the reader’s mind” and “silent reading is thus both the sign of and a means to self-awareness – but my purposes for bringing up this article end here. I don’t know if I agree with the author or not (that’s not important to me right now), but I do think it’s interesting that one of the conclusions he comes to is right on the money with one of the problems I mentioned about the philosophy of education in Nepal. I have trouble getting my students to read critically and to get beyond memorization. And they all read aloud.
The question is, is this a coincidence or are the two mutually-causing the other to be so?
Are you reading this out loud?
