Reading With the Mind's Ear: Listening to Text as a Mental Action

Abstract

If reading is understood as consisting of multiple kinds of thinking, then listening is one of the most important forms of mental action in which readers engage. Readers must hear sentences in order to make sense of nested syntactic relationships. They also must hear sounds that occur within the text in order to participate in its world, and they must attend to the voice(s) of the text or narrator. This article explores the forms of listening that expert readers engage in and suggests ways in which listening connects to fluency and the syntactic cueing system. Using a passage of a short story, it analyzes the text's demands on readers' thinking about sound. It goes on to describe specific pedagogical practices through which a group of teachers supported students' mediation of listening in independent reading workshops. Minilessons and individual conferences are discussed as sites of intervention and teaching.