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Listening To People Reading

The document discusses different levels of engagement when reading text aloud from 1 to 5. Level 1 is minimal engagement where the reader simply says what the text says without concern for meaning or context. Level 2 demonstrates some decoding difficulties. Level 3 shows readers reconstructing a discourse context even for single sentences. Level 4 has intonational choices aligned with newly created contexts from the text. Level 5 most closely approximates spontaneous interaction where the reader sees the text as a speaker's viewpoint.

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Julieta Pallero
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69 views

Listening To People Reading

The document discusses different levels of engagement when reading text aloud from 1 to 5. Level 1 is minimal engagement where the reader simply says what the text says without concern for meaning or context. Level 2 demonstrates some decoding difficulties. Level 3 shows readers reconstructing a discourse context even for single sentences. Level 4 has intonational choices aligned with newly created contexts from the text. Level 5 most closely approximates spontaneous interaction where the reader sees the text as a speaker's viewpoint.

Uploaded by

Julieta Pallero
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Listening to people reading

Among the matters investigated have been the different styles of reading that
go with different kinds of public communication on radio, television and
elsewhere. We need, first of all, some way of clarifying what readers are doing
on a particular occasion when they read aloud.

We read aloud from a prepared text The fact of working with such a text
modifies the open-ended nature of the speaker´s activity: far from happening
along the time dimension, the material exists as an already completed object
and, in certain act of reading aloud, the reader´s apprehension of its
completeness must be one of the things that determines how it is read.

It is usual to speak of reading as an interactive activity (interaction with the


text). In spite of many differences between the circumstances in which
spontaneous speech and reading aloud occur, both utilize the same repertoire
of intonational options.

There are as many different ways of speaking as there are of reading aloud.

We can set up a working classification of acts of reading aloud by recognizing


various degrees of engagement.

David Brazil identifies different kinds of reading according to how far they
resemble speech associated with the phonological form. He concentrates on
the relation with the listener on the one hand, and the relation with the context
of interaction on the other hand. He recognizes five different levels of
engagement, from minimal to full engagement.

1. Engagement 1: It is known as minimal engagement due to the fact that


there is very limited involvement on the part of speakers. Speakers have no
concern with the communicative possibilities of what they read (word-
citation). The message is the language and not the context, so the reader tends
to say what the text says. For example: to read aloud a word randomly chosen
from a dictionary is to make no assumptions about how it will fit into any
discourse. It happens that the institutionally fixed citation forms of certain
words provide us with a clue to the intonation treatment of minimally engaged
reading. Engagement 1 can be recognized as the use of extra prominences for
instance in the word /UN HAPpy/ because the distribution of prominence is
made if the words are perceived as “content words” or not. (unhappy has a
secondary stress followed by a primary stress and is read out as two
prominence tone units).

Minimally engagement does occur in other circumstances:

Inexpert or unsympathetic reading aloud of a line of verse :

/I WANdered WHEre YOU are/

Or when young learners read aloud in class:

/it was VERY WEIRD to KNOW SOMEONE/

Both examples demonstrate the reader´s limited involvement with the material
being read. Say what the text says without being concerned with what its
potential communicative implications might be. (Speakers have two choices:
prominence and division of tone units).

Finally, we may note the probability of there being a proclaiming tone.

2. Engagement 2: At this level, the reader has some decoding problems due to
the complex task of decoding in real time an already assembled text. That is
why zero tones are expected as it is the tone used for hesitations, for example.
Besides, the tone unit boundaries indicate no necessary engagement with the
kind of contextual projection that would motivate speakers in interactive
discourse.

This kind of oblique presentation would seem to differ from the minimally
engaged reading in so far as decoding and planning delays interfere with the
smooth articulation of the uninterpreted language sample.

An example can be the following /it was VERY/ GOOD / to KNOW


SOMEBODY/. This is a kind of oblique presentation because the speaker is
not involved.

Engagement 2 is described in some sense as ritualized because in the reading


there are no decoding problems.
It is hearer-sensitive in the way that it assigns prominence and tone unit
boundaries, but not so in its choice of tones (ritualistic performance: much of
the reading that forms part of religious observance or poetry). These are both
rehearsed readings. Ritualized oblique reading represents Stage 2 on our scale.

3. Engagement 3: It has to do with the reading aloud of uncontextualized


sentences and it demonstrates how readers always assign a context to what
they read. This shows a general tendency of readers to reconstruct some kind
of discourse context, even for a single sentence (they construct a
conversational setting for what they read out). Some details of the
organization of the sentences suggest what that setting would be like, and
these suggestions may be pertinent choice of particular intonation features.
For example, the use of “the” when the speaker suggests that certain
information has already been introduced, and the use of “a” with a referring
tone when the information is not shared.

4. Engagement 4: At this level, intonational choices are in line with each


newly created context of interaction that the text sets up (we expect the reader
to relate the sentence to the state of speaker/hearer understanding that the
material immediately preceding it has precipitated) . This is also related to the
reader´s memory. He/she relies mostly on what has one before in the text to
make intonational decisions. It seems not unlikely that, under the pressure of
real-time-decision-making that reading involves, readers will sometimes find
themselves in a state of decision while they are processing a text.

In making intonation decisions, the reader relies exclusively on what has gone
before in the text. Everything that has gone before merges with those areas of
shared background that play such a big part in the intonation of spontaneous
speech.

5. Engagement 5: It is the maximal engagement. It is the one that most


closely approximates to spontaneous interaction. Now there is a context to
justify assumptions. It is a kind of reading that replicates interactive speech:
speech in which participants pursue conversational purposes taking into
account the shared assumptions. The reader now has to see the text as the
embodiment of a speaker´s viewpoint. Memorization is not involved. The
situation is similar to that of an actor performing lines already set down for
him as if they were an expression of his own conversational purpose.

For the speaker, the background comprises the entire set of shared experiences
that participant bring to the interaction, whether they are shared by personal
relationships, their participation in a common culture or their common interest
in some human activities such as a sport, an academic discipline, or anything
else.

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