Lend Me Your Ears: Mass Observing Contemporary Adult Reading Aloud Practices

Abstract

Reading aloud receives a great deal of attention as something done with children and as a potential teaching tool, but less is known about the oral reading that we, as adults, may do for various purposes across our everyday lives. This article explores one element of a two-year project recording and analysing contemporary adult reading aloud practices. It reports on an analysis of all 160 Mass Observation Project responses, examining the 'atypical typicality' of correspondents' reactions to the topic and their own practices; their analytical acts as researchers classifying practices and investigating artistry; and the stories they tell about how we both express and create relationships with individuals and larger groups through our oral reading practices. Contemporary adult reading aloud practices, as presented, analysed and narrated by the Mass Observers, are ubiquitous, often invisible, hugely varied and matter to us as individuals and communities.

Adults Reading Aloud: A Survey of Contemporary Practices in Britain

“…This type of comment appears a number of times in responses to our survey, and also elsewhere in the larger research project, 'Reading Aloud in Britain Today', of which it forms a part (see for example, Duncan, 2018, Duncan, 2019. It perhaps helps to explain why forms of reading aloud have not usually had the prominence that they may warrant in either the academic literature on literacy or educational understandings of reading.…”

“…This article, then, seeks to uncover and explain the variety and extent of adult readingaloud practices in contemporary Britain. It is part of a larger project, 'Reading Aloud in Britain Today', which builds on an earlier pilot study (Duncan, 2015), to record and analyse contemporary reading aloud using multi-strand research design, including the national survey on which this article is based (see also Duncan, 2018;Duncan, 2019). 2 The questionnaire built on earlier surveys of adult reading habits and preferences, few if any of which mention reading aloud (Scales and Rhee, 2001;Gallik, 1999;Kling, 1982;Sharon, 1973;Smith, 1990;Liu, 2005), as well as studies of reading aloud to children (Scholastic, 2018;YouGov, 2018 The sample, then, is in some ways unrepresentative, most obviously in two respects: a heavy preponderance of female and university-educated respondents.…”

Fight for focus: attention and agency in sight-translated interaction

“…Sight translation can be understood as a practice of reading aloud, which is a social practice with some embedded history not necessarily shared. There is scant literature on adults' practices of reading aloud; however, a British study found that reading aloud is mostly connected to the private sphere (Duncan, 2018). This is probably the case for a literate society, where written documents in institutional settings are read in silence.…”