How teachers utilize the practice of reading aloud to promote English language development in Swedish K-3 grades.

Sammanfattning: Reading aloud is a method that has been used as a means of observational learning in schools for many years. It exists as an implicit part of many educational systems across the world, and the theories that underpin its usage are well studied. In spite of this, the method is highly open to interpretation in regards to what specific purpose reading aloud serves for the classroom, and as many studies highlight performance gaps among learners of varying proficiency, there is a lack of information in studies as to how reading aloud is contextualized between these learners. Furthermore, studies have shown that usage of reading material can vary greatly between teachers all across the world.  This study investigates how Swedish schools use reading aloud from the perspective of English language development, how educators implement the method on young learners of varying proficiency in the K-3 grades, their views on the subject, and how it relates to the core content of the English curriculum. Through observations and semi-structured interviews conducted with teachers of varying past experience, we found that teachers universally agree to the method strengthening the young learners’ pronunciation and sentence structuring, while also promoting a young learners’ sense of immersion and imagination. However, teachers were more divided on whether it is an effective method for learning vocabulary items. Furthermore, while teachers were predominantly in favor of using storybooks, opinions vary on its sustained efficacy among low-proficiency learners who may lack the capacity to compartmentalize new information, let alone immersing into longer passages of text that they do not carry an understanding for yet. With this in mind, reading aloud for low-efficiency groups is ideally sustained through significantly truncated material.