A while ago, during a learning assessment at a primary school, an eight-year-old girl described what was happening for her in the classroom better than many adults do.
She told me she could not process information when she read silently. She had to read the text out loud for it to make sense.
It wasn’t that she couldn’t read. She could read the words without any problem. The issue was that silent reading wasn’t sticking. Hearing the words helped the information go in in a way that reading silently in her head didn’t.
She wasn’t describing a reading problem in the way schools often think about reading problems. This wasn’t about phonics, accuracy or decoding. It was about processing.
Seeing the words on the page and reading silently was not enough on its own. Reading aloud gave her something extra: she could see the information, say it and hear it. This made the text easier to understand and easier to retain.
The more I thought about her comments, the more I realised that this issue went beyond one pupil describing her own learning experience.
Processing information
Research suggests that reading aloud can improve how information is processed and remembered because it involves more than one pathway.
A study conducted at the University of Waterloo found that reading words aloud improved memory compared to reading silently, a phenomenon sometimes called the “production effect” (Robidoux & Besner, 2017).
Instead of simply seeing words on a page, the reader is seeing them, saying them and hearing them.
Sitting quietly with a book does not automatically lead to understanding, enjoyment or engagement
Interestingly, this is not just something children do. A national survey of 529 adults across Britain by Duncan and Freeman found that reading aloud takes place regularly at home, at work and in everyday life, for purposes including understanding, memory, thinking and social connection (Duncan & Freeman, 2019).
In other words, reading aloud is not an unusual habit or a fallback strategy; for some people, it is simply how information makes sense.
Making sense of information
It also made me think about the learners who talk themselves through everything. The pupils who quietly narrate tasks, verbalise instructions or seem to need a running commentary to stay on track.
We do not always view this positively in classrooms. Sometimes it is seen as unnecessary talking, poor focus or a habit that needs correcting. But what if, for some learners, this is not the problem but the strategy?
Think of the person we have all worked with who tells the office exactly what they are doing, making a coffee, sending an email, going to the printer, even though none of it requires an audience. It can seem odd, unnecessary or even slightly irritating.
But what if verbalising the task is helping them organise, process and stay on track? What this eight-year-old described through reading aloud may sit within a much wider picture of how some people think and learn.
For some people, spoken language is not simply communication; it is part of how information makes sense.
Changing assumptions about reading
What does this mean for classrooms? Firstly, it may mean thinking differently about some of our assumptions around silent reading.
Strategies such as silent reading during form time are usually well-intentioned attempts to build reading habits and promote enjoyment. For many pupils, they work well.
But for learners who struggle to process information through silent reading, these experiences may feel very different. Sitting quietly with a book does not automatically lead to understanding, enjoyment or engagement.
If the information is not going in, the issue may not be motivation or effort; it may be access.
We already recognise this in another part of education. Read aloud support exists as an exam access arrangement for some learners because, in certain circumstances, hearing text can support access to written information.
Yet outside exams, we do not always stop to consider what this might mean for everyday classroom practice.
This does not mean every pupil needs to read aloud, nor does it mean giving up reading initiatives.
It may mean reconsidering them. Quiet read-aloud options, paired reading, audiobooks, text-to-speech tools, or allowing pupils to process text through more than one pathway may all have a place.
Supporting pupils to enjoy reading may, for some learners, require more than simply asking them to read silently.
Reading silently may reinforce the very difficulties that make reading hard to access in the first place
This can create an interesting tension in schools. Many literacy initiatives are built around the understandable goal of helping children enjoy reading and develop independent reading habits.
Yet for some learners, the expectation to sit silently with a book may not feel enjoyable at all. In fact, it may reinforce the very difficulties that make reading hard to access in the first place.
A pupil who can decode fluently but has difficulty processing information may leave a silent reading session appearing compliant, while having retained very little of what they have read.
This does not mean silent reading is wrong or that independent reading should be abandoned. Rather, it raises a question regarding flexibility.
If the goal is to help pupils access, understand and ultimately enjoy reading, might some of these approaches need to be reimagined for certain learners?
Could a pupil listening to an audiobook, using text-to-speech, whisper reading or quietly verbalising ideas still be developing positive reading habits?
Inclusion may not always mean changing the destination. Sometimes it means widening the routes available to get there.
A lifelong strategy
The more I thought about this, the harder it became to see it as simply a childhood or classroom issue.
In workplace assessments, I regularly meet adults who describe remarkably similar experiences.
Some talk themselves through tasks, verbalise instructions, re-read emails aloud or quietly narrate what they are doing to stay organised and focused.
Many have developed these strategies instinctively over years, often without fully recognising what they are doing or why it helps. What begins in childhood as “reading aloud” or “thinking out loud” does not necessarily disappear with age.
For some people, spoken language continues to play an important role in how they process information, organise thinking and make sense of written material.
Perhaps the real lesson here is that these differences do not suddenly appear in adulthood or vanish after school; they simply surface in different environments, masked beneath strategies people have developed to cope.
*A version of this article first appeared in the summer issue of SENDsational Futures magazine.
