Reading Aloud=>Listening Comprehension?

[sfuqua]

http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInfor ... erID=55800

These researchers found a strong correlation between L2 reading aloud skills and L2 listening skills at all of the levels they tested.

They also found a correlation between grammatical knowledge and listening, but only for lower level students.

Of course correlation does not equal causation.

There is a model of listening comprehension that suggests that "neuropsychology has evidenced a facilitative role of sensorimotor activity for
the development in L2 speech perception." This is not surprising, in that if a learner doesn't even recognize a difference between phonemes, they will not differentiate between words containing the phonemes. What was striking to me from this paper was that this relationship was maintained even at high levels of L2 knowledge.

I haven't read all of the background papers yet, but a quick glance suggests that this is legitimate scientific viewpoint right now.

Could L2 reading aloud be a royal road to listening comprehension, as long as the reader is closely approximating the L2 phonological system?
Is this a correlation that is backwards, do high levels of listening comprehension help reading aloud?
If L2 reading aloud skills are correlated closely with listening comprehension, and practicing reading aloud improves reading aloud skills, will practicing reading aloud actually improve listening comprehension?

Should everybody start doing a "Read Aloud Challenge?"

(just kidding on that last one )

[Serpent]

I've experienced this with Ukrainian I've read an entire book aloud.
In terms of listening comprehension, reading aloud is better than reading silently, but it's much easier just to do listening. If you have access to good recordings, you shouldn't be your main source of input.

But the biggest concerns here are that it's tiring and can be boring (even when reading silently we can get bored of our own voice), and often it's overkill and generally not the best way to make progress. Sounds like a recipe for burnout and quitting

[jeff_lindqvist]

Every book I've read in Irish, I've read aloud. During the latest bilingual English-Irish combo, I read the English aloud as well (The Hound of the Baskervilles/Cú na mBaskerville).

[lusan]

Very interesting. When I did Polish Assimil I read aloud several times those lessons. My current italki tutor made me read aloud all the time.

[Serpent]

Now that I've had the time to look at the paper... I'm not impressed First of all, the correlation is with the reading aloud performance, rather than whether the person has actually read something aloud for a total of 15 hours or more over the course of 1 month or more (and at least 2-3 times a week, with at least 1 active week within the latest 6), which is what I'd consider the minimal requirements for testing the effectiveness of reading aloud.

Then, they were testing native Japanese speakers learning English, all young; presumably with a lot of exposure to music, movies, perhaps computer games. Any meaningful research has to take into account what else they've done to improve their English. Not to mention that listening tests are often superficial and easy to guess just through your knowledge of the world, as well as keywords etc. The recording was probably clear and textbookish and formal.

More importantly, the "higher" or "lower" levels just refer to the person's performance in their listening test. We have no proof that anyone was above B1 or so. The grammar tested was about this level, perhaps venturing into B2. They don't share detailed stats; does this mean the scores ranged from 5 to 33? Out of 45 btw. Ugh. And they excluded two extreme cases because they're of course inconclusive. I don't know if the range they actually focused on is covered by the standard deviation, that would be 11-28. I repeat. This means they're making conclusions about learners who can't confidently handle sentences like "They have known each other for ten years when they got married" at best and "Kevin has three blue shirt" at worst. And all of them have been learning English for years. No, not impressed The mean reading scores were only minimally different, at 19 vs 21. They were also testing reading aloud on a different day, although we all know that your level can fluctuate a lot even at C1 or so.

I'm also suspicious of the way they aren't sharing detailed stats. Maybe they genuinely think they aren't important though.

Here's the text the people were to read aloud:

Natsume Soseki went to Britain about 100 years ago as a student sent by the Ministry of Education. He was 33 years old and a professor at the Fifth High School in Kumamoto then. He left Yokohama by ship in September 1900, and reached London two months later. Britain was more developed than other countries in those days. There was already a web of undergrounds in London―30 years before the first underground in Tokyo. Everything Soseki saw and heard was a wonder. He enjoyed buying used books, walking in the parks and going to the theaters. He wrote this to his wife: “I wish you could see the wonderful theater shows. In one show, I saw about sixty women dancing on the stage in gorgeous costumes.”

They had 1 minute to read it silently at first. It's likely that the ones that did worse just couldn't understand well enough what they were reading. And it's not surprising that those who are good at listening also knew how to pronounce the words and what intonation to use, and where to start and finish each phrase.

PS My friend did say that my reading aloud in Ukrainian was much better than that of her fellow Russian-speaking classmates. But I'm sure they're all much better at listening. My friend herself said she had been able to understand pretty much everything in Ukrainian by the time she started primary school.

[sfuqua]

I also wonder about the journal.
It looks like it might have been a paper from a class.
Assuming they didn't lie, though, it is a conversation starter.
They are definitely just looking at correlations; and this is the thing that bothers me the most. If several things are correlated at another thing then they will be correlated with each other.

[Serpent]

As arthaey just RT'ed,

I'm just sayin', everyone that confuses correlation with causation eventually ends up dead.

[iguanamon]

These studies never take into account self-learners. That's probably because it would be like "herding cats". So the default research subjects are almost always classroom students. That and, that's the market for this type of research. Your society wants more people to speak a second language- send them to school. I'm not surprised that classroom students aren't very good at listening and that reading aloud can make them better. They're in class for an hour a day. How many of them are going home and really working on listening during their out of class hours? At least they're hearing something by reading aloud.

The quest for the magic bullet, the aha! moment is so seductive. It's no wonder that it is a more tantalizing option than- "do the hard work and make the effort necessary to train listening (and by the way, it may take months)" is. [sarcasm]Who wants to listen every day? It's hard. It's frustrating. People have accents. They drop letters and slur words together. They sometimes use slang. People don't have pause buttons and you can't rewind them or slow them down with audacity. There's ambient noise. Those dratted people have no subtitle balloons either![/sarcasm]

My point is that in comparison to reading, listening is harder to train. The good news is that it can be trained but there's work and effort involved. "Just pick up a book... it's easier" is human nature. We tend to default to the easy way, given half a chance. I wonder, how many people who say they have trouble with listening give it as much effort as they do reading? I'm not saying that reading aloud won't help. I do it, myself, sometimes. It's just not the "magic pill".

[Serpent]

Yeah, a vast majority just doesn't do enough listening. I've been there myself, though nowadays I find it easier to watch/listen than to read.

Although given that we're speaking of English, I'm sure at least some of those learners actually put in the hours. Most likely the ones that did best at listening