A recent podcast on Voice of Literacy discussed the idea of inner prosody during silent reading. Established readers have an inner voice as they read, an inner voice that has rhythm and melody. Struggling readers may lack this voice and read in a monotone way, actually reading the spaces in a rigid way. The difficulty is that in written language, there is no obvious way to indicate the natural flow and fluctuations of a sentence. It is something that is ascertained over time, as a person gains acquaintance with the language.
In her studies with inner prosody, Dr. Jennifer Gross suggests a method of helping struggling readers form that inner voice. When people speak, they tend to articulate and place emphasis on the important parts of their point. Gross suggests trying to do something similar with written language. In order to do this, she suggests that certain texts used to help struggling readers should capitalize the parts of a word or sentence that are meant to be emphasized to help children see how the sentence should sound. She provides the example of when a person receives an e-mail in all caps, that person assumes the sender was angry or excited about something and her inner voice senses this distinction. The hope is that struggling readers will learn to distinguish the prosody of written language by seeing it in writing and hearing it when others read, developing their own inner prosody as they read aloud but which continues during silent reading.
Her experimentation with this unique representation of written language is just beginning, but it will be interesting to see how books written in this way might help struggling readers.
Source: Baker. F. A. & Gross J. (2014, March 10). The importance and support of intonation during silent reading. Voice of Literacy. Podcast retrieved from http://voiceofliteracy.org.
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