Reading Out Loud for Literary Education?

What happens when children read literary texts aloud to other children in the classroom? Specifically, how does that practice affect their literary understanding of texts? Despite its historical anteriority to reading silently, reading aloud still suffers from centuries of being relegated to a childish practice. Many still feel that listening to an audiobook is 'cheating', and few adults read literary texts to each other out loud regularly. Particularly, reading aloud is rarely considered as part of literary education. In the classroom, it is mostly a way of checking decoding and fluency, rather than a mode of aesthetic engagement in its own right.

In this talk, I want to think of reading out loud as a bridge towards sophisticated literary understanding, distinct from oral storytelling and from dramatic performance. Drawing from preliminary results in a larger project on Les Petits Champions de la Lecture (a reading-aloud competition in France that 150,000 children take part in every year), I shall suggest that reading aloud is particularly well-suited to progressive approaches to literary teaching of the kind Rita Felski (2009) advocates, going from affective responses to analysis, in a communal, joyful way.

Clementine Beauvais is a senior lecturer in children's literature at the University of York (UK) and a children's writer and translator in French and in English. She is also the public ambassador for the reading-aloud competition Les petits champions de la lecture.