ALSphere Foundation
The other day, I happened to visit a colleague’s place. As we sat together and chatted, I could hear her son reciting tables to his grandfather, a ritual that we performed every morning in our childhood. When I asked her how she inculcated this habit in him, she said, “It’s his grandfather who makes him read aloud, and he too loves it.”
I felt like I was revisiting my childhood. One two are two. Two twos are four, … Our parents always encouraged us to read aloud. The voice still rings in my ears–rhythm, tone, intonation and my moving around in the courtyard while reciting, all remain intact. These sounds echoed through the whole house every morning, the vivacious and veritable sounds of learning and studying.
As we got ready, our father, flipping through the pages of the newspaper, would ask us to recite Tagore’s “Where the Mind is Without Fear,” and the record player fitted in our memory box played at once and stopped at the last line, “into that heaven of freedom, let my country awake.” With a pat on the back, it was then the turn of ‘photosynthesis’. Quickly we replied, without blinking our eyes, “The process by which plants harness energy from sunlight into chemical energy is known as photosynthesis.” He smiled and hugged me as I ran with my water bottle, and satchel to hop into the school van.
Reading aloud is one thing that my parents always wanted my siblings and me to do. I believe that it assured them that we were focused on our studies. If our voices trailed off, a peep into the room by one of the parents was a kind of warning to turn up the volume. Even when I joined college, the habit of reading aloud helped me from getting distracted by the surrounding noisy activities. The inflexion was alluring and addictive, and remained with me when I became a teacher and then a mother to my boy.
While in his infancy, he recited nursery rhymes aloud, but as he grew, he preferred to sit quietly and study. I strained to hear some sounds coming from his closed door, but only pin-drop silence permeated through the shiny veneer. Whenever we sat together, I tried to coax him to read aloud so that he would not get distracted, but I met with his polite but firm ‘no’ as he shrugged his shoulders and my husband gestured me to close the topic.
This rather made me regret as he started humming some music and the conversation skidded to monosyllables, shutting out all hope of further dialogue on the topic. All my efforts to hear him study Newton’s Law of Gravitation or solve Pythagoras ended in the predictable climax of not being able to listen to a sound. He preferred music being played. I couldn’t comprehend his managing music and studying together simultaneously. However, he got through his studies with flying colours.
Well, time flew away and now he is well settled. He has achieved all this quietly and quintessentially. We now have healthy and happy conversations, no earphones or blaring music threatening to gag me.
However, recently, I stumbled upon a research article by Colin Macleod, a psychologist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, which dwelled upon the benefit of reading aloud by children because it makes children focus on sounds and meaning, leads to better memory, promotes fluency, has a calming effect on mind, strengthens emotional bonds and enhances critical thinking. And “It’s beneficial throughout the age range,” Ulrich Boser, an American author, wrote in an article in the Harvard Business Review, “Talking to yourself( out loud) can help you learn.” I made my son read it, and he nodded smilingly. Now I await eagerly to see if he makes his kids learn aloud, and I will have the last laugh!
Dr Ritu Kamra Kumar
