James Dunn
Theories & Models of Literacy
October 20, 2015
Barbara Gleason, Professor
When I was in third grade, my teacher would have us take turns reading aloud in class. I
loved it. There was something satisfying about being able to read aloud in front of others. There
was something really natural about it. In hindsight, it helped me to decode words quickly and
accurately and to improve my reading comprehension. My parents and teachers would praise me
for how well read I aloud. Yet, sometime around fourth grade, I transitioned from reading in
front of an audience of my peers to reading aloud only in private—beyond the earshot of other
people.
Apparently, reading aloud was once the rule rather than the exception. During the
Middle Ages, oral reading—rather than silent reading—was the accepted way of reading.
According to Alberto Manguel, in a chapter titled, “The Silent Readers”:
Written words, from the days of the first Sumerian tablets, were meant to be
pronounced out loud, since the signs carried implicit, as if it were their soul, a
particular sound. Faced with a written text, the reader had a duty to lend voice to
the silent letters, the written text, the reader had a duty to lend voice to silent
letters, the scripta, and to allow them to become, in the delicate biblical
distinction, verba, spoken words—spirit. The primordial languages of the
Bible—Aramaic and Hebrew—do not differentiate between the act of reading and
the act of speaking; they name both with the same word. (45)
In other words, writers composed manuscripts for an audience and with a clear purpose in mind.
They assumed that “their readers would hear rather than simply see the text, much as they
themselves spoke their words out loud as they composed them” (Manguel 47). This assumption
made sense, for illiteracy was common and reading aloud made texts more accessible to a wider
audience. Public readings were used as a way to share books and written words.
However, oral reading had implications for the way that text appeared in manuscripts.
Since books were mainly read out loud, the letters that composed them did not need to be
separated into distinct phonetic units. Instead, they were strung together in continuous sentences.
Basically, ancient texts did not make use of spaces between words and punctuation between
sentences. According to Manguel, text written continuously, called scriptura continua, is
difficult to read. In fact, one can read such texts only by pronouncing the words. Even then, one
is likely to misread certain parts of the texts. (48)
One thing that is apparent is that there is a difference between hearing or listening to
language and the visual representation of written text in books and manuscripts. After all, when
we speak there is no space between words and if you are hearing a language it can take a while to
really tell where one word begins and another ends. I know from personal experience that it is
much easier to read words in a foreign language than it is to aurally decipher them through
conversation. Often times hearing a foreign language can sound like a bunch of jibberish. From
my experience, it is easier to decode a foreign language from reading and phonemic awareness
rather than solely an aurally-oriented approach to language learning.
Yet, In Spaces Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading, Paul Saenger argues that
silent reading only began to be possible with the introduction, in the 7th century a.d., of spaces
between words. Saenger writes, “The importance of word separation by space is unquestionable,
for it freed the intellectual faculties of the reader, permitting all texts to be read silently, that is
with eyes alone.” (13) Basically Saenger is saying that the changes in text format set the stage for
modern reading which he calls a “silent, solitary, and rapid activity.” (1) During my visit to the
Rare Books and Manuscripts Library in Butler Library, I saw several examples of word
separation in theological and exegetical texts from the 12th and 13th centuries. For instance, in a
12th century bible with origins in France, I can see the separation of Latin words and evidence of
punctuation marks such as a points and dashes.
Another manuscript that I saw at the Butler Library had to do with what Manguel calls
per cola et commata. This precursor to word spacing was “a primitive form of punctuation that
helped the unsteady reader to lower or raise the voice at the end of a block of thought.” (49) It
kind existed as a sort of index for researchers and for readers whose voice needed to rise or fall
at the end of what we nowadays call a paragraph or passage. This modest step towards silent
reading moved away from seeing at reading as more of a listening process and more of a
I do not know if reading aloud is still encouraged as a way of helping students to learn
words quickly and accurately. However, I can see how this idea about how to help children
become good readers is rooted in the historical debate between oral reading and silent reading.
Some scholars argue that children must develop phonemic awareness or the understanding of the
sounds that make up a spoken language, as well as phonic skills or an understanding of the
sounds that letters and letter combinations make in order to become successful readers. In
Learning to Read: The Great Debate, Jeanne S. Chall lists some of the principles by which
educators approached reading instruction in the 1930s. One of the items that Chall lists is the
following: “The child should start with “meaningful reading” of whole words, sentences, and
stories as closely geared to his own experiences and interests as possible. Silent reading should
be stressed from the beginning.” (14) Chall’s work is important because she argued that phonics
is a more effective teaching method than the whole language approach to literacy instruction.
Basically Chall is pointing out how prevalent the idea of silent reading is in relation to oral
reading. Of course, Chall challenges this notion that silent reading has some kind of hegemony
over phonics. She argues that phonics is a more effective method than the whole language
approach to literacy instruction which stresses language immersion.
It is ironic that silent reading would be stressed over oral reading because the latter is the
original practice from which our presence practice of literacy has deviated. In order to read
fluently and to comprehend what I read, I do not think that phonics and oral reading, in general
should be deemphasized. However, despite some resistance to oral reading, it has existed
throughout human history.
Manguel writes that Augustine, a professor of Rhetoric, “knew that letters’ were “signs of
sounds” and they were “signs of what we think.” I think Augustine’s appraisal of the cognitive
processes involved in reading are expressed in Saenger’s Space Between Words: The Original
Silent Reading. Saeger writes:
The cognitive skills required for decoding of text depend on a variety of
neurophysical processes that historically readers in different civilizations have
employed in different ways to extract meaning from the page. Two factors
intrinsic to all written documents determine the nature of physiological processes.
The first is the structure of the language itself. The frequency of polysyllabic
words, the absence or presence of inflection, and the different conventions for
word order al determine which mental capacities are required for the decoding of
written as well as oral language. (1)
The differences between an aural reception of language and a visual perception were quite
evident from our visit to the Butler Library. Some of the texts used scripts that everyone could
read for publications like the bible. Others like the Formulary were published to show people
how to do something.
