I never thought that there was anything wrong with getting students to read along with a text as I, or a classmate, read out the words; if anything, it seemed natural.

It wasn’t until I observed one of my trainee’s lessons with a Year 10 group that I began to think differently. The teacher was reading a case study beautifully, and the students were following along. There was a questioning phase afterwards and then the teacher moved on.

I asked the student next to me what he remembered about the case study and he couldn’t say. It wasn’t that he was being awkward, I know him well. It also wasn’t that he wasn’t concentrating (quite the opposite, in fact). This got me thinking.

Later, when I was teaching a lesson of my own, I asked a couple of my Year 11s what they found hardest about Jekyll and Hyde - their response: reading along while someone else reads out loud.

The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. It dawned on me that listening and reading at the same time may actually overload learners.

We need to understand cognitive load theory to begin to consider this. Sweller and Chandler (1991) proposed the original distinction between intrinsic and extraneous load: the former is proposed as being inherent in the task and the latter is part of the instructional design of the task. Intrinsic load is necessary load while extraneous load is a source of interference and needs to be minimised for effective learning.

So by reading and listening, we could be unnecessarily overloading students’ working memories, by creating a higher extraneous load from two inputs.

It isn’t as simple as that, though. We know that two sensory inputs can be beneficial for learning. The concept of dual coding is widely believed to aid learning because both visual and verbal codes can be used when recalling information (Sternberg, 2003).

So experiencing words through both visual and auditory channels should be a positive, but if we look at working memory more closely, we see this may not be the case when it comes to reading.

Baddeley and Hitch (2011) put forth that our working memory contains four distinct components:

• The central executive (CE), which focuses on what we want to take in (but is susceptible to distraction).
• The phonological loop (PL), which deals with verbal information.
• The visuo-spatial sketchpad (VSS), which processes visual information (and the spatial relationships between objects).
• The episodic buffer (EB), which links and adds information from the PL and VSS with our long-term memory.

Our brains are able to deal with stimulus being processed in two areas simultaneously. The aforementioned dual coding is a good example of this. Our brains can see a picture (processed in the VSS) and hear a word (processed in the PL) and, if the two are connected and explained properly, we can reduce cognitive load.

So by listening we are processing in the phonological loop. What are we doing by following the words? Reading silently.

And this is where I think our error often lies. Reading is based on visual input but the process is auditory. We see the words but hear a voice in our heads decoding them. By reading silently, we are once again processing in the phonological loop (with the voice in our heads). Because of this, students have to prioritise and their episodic buffer has to essentially choose which input is more important, so they can’t fully focus on you reading or them reading themselves.

This idea is supported by Kalyuga, Chandler and Sweller (2004). Across three experimental studies, they found that presentation of identical written and auditory material has deleterious effects on learning, compared with sequential presentation modes.

It was hypothesised that the reason for this effect was that simultaneous presentations overloaded working memory. Their experiments weren’t conducted with secondary pupils, however, and although their findings were in line with my thoughts, I needed to prove that reading along while being read to does in fact inhibit learning.

Luckily, I work with some like-minded individuals. A colleague of mine had spoken to me about the concept of reading and listening simultaneously and we both found it counterintuitive. So we decided to do some research of our own.

Our small-scale study was simple. We had two higher-attaining English classes and two lower-attaining ones. One higher and one lower set class were read to each lesson and told to follow along, the other classes were instructed differently: they did not follow the text.

After the reading, the students sat 10 multiple-choice questions on what had been read, requiring a mixture of comprehension and inference.

We were able to draw some general conclusions that may provide a basis for further investigation into the topic. If nothing else, the evidence suggests that there are sub-groups whose learning is detrimentally affected when they are instructed to follow text while they are read to. To summarise our findings:

• There was no evidence in the quantitative data to suggest that boys or girls benefitted more from either approach. This seems to contradict some of the previous research about the way in which certain approaches benefit boys. Boys have always been seen as susceptible to reading along and researchers often suggest that reading is an area of difficulty for boys (Gilbert, 2007). We found that boys performed no differently to girls with regard to being read to.
• The data yield did suggest that attainment level has an impact on how effective reading along can be. The higher-attaining students showed very little fluctuation regardless of approach, but there was a clear dip in the comprehension and ability to infer meaning from the text when lower-attaining students were instructed to read along.
• From our qualitative data, we found that students often find reading along difficult as they lose their place because they can’t read quickly enough or because they can read more fluently than the person reading aloud (be that their teacher or another student).

There was variation within these groups, of course, but these results highlight the importance of tailoring your teaching approach to those in front of you.

One reason for the negative impact on lower attainers may be that they are less fluent readers and therefore keeping pace with somebody else reading increases the extraneous load because they aren’t able to read at the same rate. Equally, it could be attributed to a vocabulary gap between lower and higher attainers. Quigley (2018) highlights vocabulary as one of the inhibiting factors for learners accessing information.

Whatever the reason, it seems that our traditional approach to reading and getting students to follow along may actually be slowing learning.

My study is only on a tiny scale, but it does highlight the importance of thinking about the little things when it comes to teaching classes. Reading information is often the gateway to new learning, so we need to get it right.

So what has this done for my practice? It has made me more aware of the acute necessity of knowing my groups’ needs. Using approaches suggested by Lemov, Driggs and Woolway in Reading Reconsidered (2016) I’ve tried to vary the ways I read with my classes. Accountable independent reading, close reading and focusing on implicit and explicit vocabulary learning using “stop and jot” tasks, have all proved much better ways of improving understanding of a text than simply having students follow in their own copies of the book.

I often used approaches like this before, but the emphasis was on students focusing on following the text at all times…now I focus on the learning not the following.

Of course, simply telling students they don’t have to follow the text when being read to could lead to disengagement. At the same time, we want to reduce the cognitive load. I’m still experimenting with ways that get the balance of desirable difficulty and low extraneous load.

In teaching, we often follow traditions without questioning them. Reading along isn’t helpful for some students and I would have never considered this previously. If anyone has any interest in extending this idea, I’d love to do a wider spread study. Maybe this is one of the answers to closing the literacy gap that we see emerging in schools.

Adam Riches is a specialist leader of education and a lead teacher in English. He tweets @TeachMrRiches

This article originally appeared in the 21 June 2019 issue under the headline “Could reading along be the wrong choice?”