I previously wrote about poetry or essay cafe because I was pleasantly surprised at how much harder students worked on their writing pieces when they knew they would be reading to the class. This past Friday, I discovered another reason to have essay read-alouds. It is an amazing tool for teaching editing.
I had several students that stumbled over sentences, words or phrases or even did a stand-up-editing-comedy-routine.
I usually edit their work and students must return their polished copy for a final grade. This time, I gave papers back with instructions to edit their own work--they already knew where changes had to be made from reading out loud.
I'm a History teaching major and an English teaching minor. Recently I got the idea to have my future students write their own historical (fact or fiction) short stories based on primary sources and then have "story time" every friday where the student who's story dealt with the time period we'd been discussing would get up and read. This blog post made me happy because it supports this crazy idea of mine. How ingenious to also use it as an editing tool! It seems like as I TA I keep telling the students that come in to read their papers aloud or have a friend read them aloud to them. Even as college students we don't always realize what a valuable tool that can be!
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ReplyDeleteI really like this idea of having student read aloud to self-edit their work. It makes sense that if they're aware they will be reading a piece to the class that they will put more effort into it, but the additional bonus of having them also find mistakes within their work is excellent. I'll definitely keep this in mind.
ReplyDeleteReading aloud was how we learned how to pace our reading and improve as writers, pausing for commas and longer for periods, etc. To tell you how long ago I went to school, we had elocution lessons to ready ourselves for speech contests!
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