Last week in my graduate school seminar I had the students prepare a page or so from the book we're reading (From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler [1967] buy E. L. Kongisberg) to read out loud in class, and to be ready to explain why they had chosen that passage.
I was inspired to have them do that by two things: first, every time I have them read some paragraph or passage out loud in class on the spur of the moment, I am surprised by how hard it is for them to read aloud and for me to listen to them; second, my wife and I started watching a Japanese TV drama in which the main character is a mathematician whose wife has left him because he never empathized with her or their two small kids and who has recently begun changing as a result of participating in a reading out loud class. My wife told me that Japanese roudoku(朗読)cannot really be translated into English as "reading aloud" or "reciting" etc. The Japanese "word" is comprised of two kanji (Chinese characters), the second 読 meaning "read" and the first 朗 something like cheerful, pleasure, etc. . . . ANYWAY, I had the students do it, and they did great! It was really interesting to see which passages they chose and why they chose them and then of course to hear them read the passages. Whereas they are usually unsure and halting when made to read out lout impromptu, raising their voices questioningly after many words because they're not sure they read them with correct pronunciation, etc., when they read the passages they'd practiced, they were smooth, confident, engaged, and engaging. One student chose a letter written to the two kids who've run away to secretly live inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC by the museum's director, gently explaining to them why the "clue" they provided the museum (in an anonymous letter) is not so useful in proving whether or not Michelangelo actually sculpted a debatable statue of an angel in the museum; one student chose a passage where the kids Claudia and Jamie are crushed after reading the director's letter; one student chose a passage where the kids figure out how to type their anonymous letter to the museum; and so on. The other students also had ideas about each other's chosen passages. The activity helped us focus on key scenes in the reading. I hope it helped the students pay closer attention to the text and imagine its situations and characters more deeply! It's something I'll try again in future, with my under graduate and graduate students. It did give me pleasure and make me cheerful to listen to them!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
Categories |