A fresh perspective: Why read aloud?

By Solveig Rose-Mollard

Translated by Richard Peters

 

“Mummy, book!” I hear these words every night. My two-year-old just won’t go to bed without one. He sits attentively next to me in his reading chair (not on my lap, please!) and drinks in everything he sees and hears. When it’s finally time to close the book that he picked out, it’s not unusual for him to shed a few tears.

Even though it can sometimes be tough for us after a long, busy day, it’s a ritual his dad and I both enjoy. Everybody knows, of course, that reading aloud is good for kids: their vocabulary, imagination, concentration, and ability to read all benefit. One study has shown that in affluent countries like Germany, children’s educational opportunities depend to a great extent on how full the bookshelves are in their home and how thoroughly they’re taught what to do with them. Here in Germany, a wide variety of organisations and institutions promote reading aloud. Among them is Stiftung Lesen (the Reading Foundation), with tips galore on which books are suitable for which age group, and what to look out for when reading aloud. It also provides powerful, scientifically supported arguments as to why those who don’t like reading aloud should push themselves out of their comfort zone. Germany has even introduced a National Reading Aloud Day: every year on the third Friday in November, events devoted to reading aloud are held around the country. The message at all of them boils down to this: Parents, read to your children!

But what about the parents themselves or other adults? Is it only children who benefit from reading aloud? Amid all the efforts made in children’s best interests, this question seems to get lost in the noise. And yet it’s definitely enriching for us as adults to take a fresh look at our world through the eyes of a child. It lets us question facts that we grown-ups normally take for granted. “Look at that bird flying by!” – “How DOES it fly?” How indeed? Books that are supposed to explain the world to little ones will as often as not open our own eyes to alternatives and new ways of looking at life. All of a sudden, we spot things we haven’t noticed for a long time. What about the animals that are startled by the rumble of cars and the clatter of people passing through the forest? Rubbish that has been carelessly discarded and left to rot by the wayside? Rays of summer sun that give us inner warmth on cold winter days? Time and again, the stresses of our daily work routine – or what we call the “adult world”, which all too often means the same – stop us from focusing on the precious little things in life. To borrow from Michael Ende, our flowers-of-an-hour are destined to fade in a flash – so taking a moment to pause and reflect (and not just during Yuletide) can do a world of good.

But even without assuming the perspective of an innocent child, reading aloud provides an opportunity for slowing down, reflection, and contemplation. People who read in silence will oftentimes skim lines or entire pages, whether in journalism or literature, just to get to the point. Or do you actually give every comma and every dash its due when reading in your head? Engaging with a text out loud allows us to immerse ourselves more deeply in what we’re reading. It lets us stop time, and it proffers material for discussion – either later or while we’re still reading – of what we’ve heard together. This itself can turn into an interesting exchange that reveals much, perhaps even something unexpected, about our (reading) partner(s).

As it happens, for us as Franco-German translator parents in a bilingual household, our son’s love of books has an additional educational effect: whether his current favourite book is in German or French, he’ll happily demand it from both of us. During our studies, “sight translation” – in which you have to orally translate a written text into another language spontaneously and with little preparation – tended to be a rather dry and at times agonising exercise. Now, it has morphed into a whole new challenge: since as parents we’ve decided that each of us speaks to our child only in our own mother tongue, we have to translate the story in question on the fly – and not only correctly but also in a way that makes it appealing and gripping. If mummy gets stuck because she can’t think of the right phrase in German, she’ll soon hear the words: “Mummy, no. Daddy!”