We are delighted to be beginning the New Year with a wonderful programme of talks, beginning with Sam Duncan’s book launch on 8th January. Free registration for all events will be available from 5th January onwards here.
Posted on behalf of Sam Duncan:
On 8th January, I am giving a short online talk for the Literacy Research Centre for the launch of my new book, Oral Literacies: when adults read aloud. I am really looking forward to this and have been thinking about the different ways I could talk about this book. It can be hard to talk about something you’ve already thought about, talked about and written about so much. This book also feels like several different things at once.
As a record and analysis of contemporary adult oral reading practices, it is simply the book I wanted to read. It is the book I assumed existed and that I would be able to dip into in a library somewhere to find out more about the different sorts of ways adults today read aloud. It is the book I thought I should be referencing when trying to write about reading aloud in the adult literacy classroom and trying to disentangle uses of oral reading to develop fluent silent reading and uses of oral reading to develop forms of oral reading that learners wanted to take part in outside of class. It is a version of the book I was surprised to find did not exist.
This book is also the culmination of a research project that started years before, with small London-based pilot project (Duncan, 2015) that I came to the Lancaster Literacy Research Discussion Group to talk about in 2015, realising on the train home how much more I wanted to find out. And so it developed into a large research bid, and even larger project, Reading Aloud in Britain Today: with 49 interviews instead of 17, across Scotland, Wales and England (rather than within one London borough), alongside a questionnaire (with over 500 participants), Mass Observation directive (now an archive of 160 pieces of writing) and audio-recordings of examples of adults reading aloud (as well as most of the interviews) forming a collection in the British Library Sound Archive. Each of these methods of data collection, and each archive, is focussed on the question of whether, when, where, why and how adults across Britain today might read out loud rather than in silence. Part 1 of the book reports on this research project, its genesis, rationale, methods and findings. Part 2 examines these findings in more depth, and alongside other examples from across the world, exploring oral reading with family, friends and lovers; in working and public life; in religious practice; as part of what we could call our ‘literary lives’; in and for education; and a chapter devoted to the reading aloud that happens in solitude.
The above are two different ways I could (and probably will) talk about this book. But since it is a very cold December at the end of a particularly bleak year, the way that I’d rather think of the book right now is as a sort of living Christmas-tree ornament, a little house with windows through which we can see the inhabitants only in silhouette. We might glimpse a father and daughter reading aloud to each other from a 1930s house brochure, laughing as they read, or a young man alone at a desk reading a text-book out loud over and over to remember it for an exam. Through another window we might see a woman being ‘wooed’ by her future husband reading her the metaphysical poets, a grandfather recording himself reading Thomas the Tank Engine for his grandson (who will write about it fifty years later), or a man reading aloud to relieve his wife’s constipation. We might see someone eating sausages while reading letters to a cat and someone else listening to a poem on the radio, broadcast from a far-off land and in a language the listener doesn’t understand. A different window might reveal an actor reading aloud a monologue over and over to prepare for an audition, while next door a family chants prayers in unison. We might see two brothers making a cake together, one of them reading each step aloud as they go, and in the background we might hear the sounds of Gaelic karaoke.
Of course not all the examples of oral reading in the book take place in the home – some take place in fields, boats, places of worship, schools and universities, book shops, art galleries, chemist shops, supermarkets, townhalls, city streets, cafés and court rooms. But the home, particularly viewed from the outside, is still the best representation of what I was trying to do in the project: to talk about those practices which happen behind closed doors, where our experiences of other peoples’ lives are so limited, and to think about literacy practices in terms of the more and less dominant, the visible and invisible, the audible and the silent, the noticed and the ignored. An adult reading to a child is form of oral reading that is talked about quite a lot; one adult reading to another adult less so. This really was the aim of the project, and the book, to encourage us all to notice and talk about a wider range of reading practices, and the meanings and purposes involved. I look forward to our discussion on the 8th of January, to hearing your thoughts on the book and the possible next stages to this endeavour.
Duncan, S. (2021). Oral literacies: when adults read aloud. London: Routledge.
Duncan, S. (2015). Reading aloud in Lewisham: an exploration of adult reading‐aloud practices. Literacy, 49(2), 84-90.
Literacies Log 