Reading Aloud in Britain Today (RABiT)

Reading Aloud in Britain Today (RABiT) will be the first comprehensive study of contemporary adult reading aloud practices. While regular attention is paid to reading aloud as a tool for teaching and learning, far less is paid to the reading aloud that adults do every day at home, work and in the community. These everyday oral reading practices are largely overlooked in academic and educational discussions of reading. What, where, how and why do adults read aloud, or listen to others reading? When a person is completely alone, do they read silently because there is no one to listen, or do they read aloud because there is no one to hear? How do couples, families and groups use reading aloud as a way of being together? Why do some people read aloud in languages they do not understand? When and why do we read aloud at work? How does reading aloud relate to recitation, chanting, singing or storytelling? To writing or memorizing? To power and authority?

This project will explore reading aloud as cultural practice, transforming contemporary conceptualisations of what reading is or involves by documenting and analysing contemporary adult reading aloud practices and their role in adult lives. I will use a Mass Observation Project directive, a questionnaire, in-depth interviews and audio-recording of practices to capture the practices of adults across Britain. I will work with the three Project Partners (British Library, Reading Agency, Learning and Work Institute), the RaPAL Regional Advocates Network, the Glasgow Women's Library, the Scottish Poetry Library and the Project Advisory Group to reach out to adults of different ages, genders, socio-economic backgrounds, ethnicities, faiths, employment status and language backgrounds, across urban and rural Britain. In this way, I will disseminate information about the project, recruit participants for the data collection activities of year one, invite participation in the Regional Community Events in year two and call for feedback and ideas throughout the project.

RABiT will create an account of the varied everyday reading aloud practices of adults across different local, linguistic and faith communities in England, Wales and Scotland. This developed understanding of the diversity of adult reading practices will expand understandings of reading itself, which will be of interest not only to all those engaged in forms of academic reading research but also to those supporting adults with reading formally or informally. Project findings will be disseminated to both academic and community/practitioner audiences through the project website, a directive in the Mass Observation Project Archive, a collection of audio-recordings in the British Library Sound Archive, academic and non-academic presentations and articles, and a book - the first major work on contemporary adult reading aloud practices. Academic leadership will be further developed through a Symposium, and Special Issue of the journal Changing English, to generate new and gather existing relevant research from different disciplines with an interest in reading, literacy or cultural practice. Community engagement will be developed through the four Regional Community Events (in Wales, Scotland and England) where a mixed group of those who engage with adults in reading (including librarians, adult literacy teachers, reading circle facilitators, members of faith groups and community workers) will be invited to explore implications of the findings, leading to the production of 3 Next Steps Guides resources.

By the end of the 2 years of project funding, RABiT will have 1) dramatically increased academic and public awareness of the reading aloud that adults across Britain do in our everyday lives, 2) created written and aural records of these practices for anyone to read or listen to, and 3) expanded cultural conceptions of 'reading' itself, challenging us all to think more carefully about the role of reading in adult life.

This study will explore reading aloud as a cultural practice across Britain, transforming contemporary conceptualisations of what reading is or involves by documenting and analysing contemporary adult reading aloud practices and their role in adult lives. The data collection activities in year one will be followed by two strands of Leadership Activities in year two: Strand A focussed on academic engagement and Strand B focussed on community and practitioner engagement. In this way, the project will engage community groups, practitioners and researchers in debate and discussion on diverse contemporary adult reading aloud practices and what these mean for our understandings of reading as cultural practice. Through the professional and local networks of the Project Partners (Reading Agency, Learning & Work Institute and the British Library), The Mass Observation Project, RaPAL Regional Advocates and Advisory Group members, RABiT will engage adults across Britain in co-production through the main data collection aspects of the project in year 1 and the community engagement activities in year 2, and will produce:

1. A Project website hosted by UCL
2. Four Regional Community Events producing 3 Next Steps Guides
3. Two academic conference presentations
3. A one-day Symposium leading to a Special Issue of Changing English
4. One academic journal article, a Reading Agency blog and one short community/practitioner-facing article;
5. Permanent and publically accessible contributions to the Mass Observation Project Archive and the British Library Sound Archive;
6. A landmark monograph (the proposal for which will be produced during the funded project; the book will be written after the funded project).

This project will encourage those creating or adapting literacy curricula to think a bit more carefully about the diverse literacy practices performed in contemporary Britain, and the skills, cognitive processes and cultural interactions at play. It will influence publishers or broadcasters who might want to know what people are actually doing with their books, blogs or recordings behind closed doors, a subject about which little is presently known, beyond the common but misleading assumption that other people's practices are more or less like our own. This project's recording and analysis of contemporary reading aloud practices will have an impact on how reading is conceptualised not only by academic researchers in the fields of reading research, literacy, literary and cultural studies, but also by all those engaged with adults on aspects of their reading, from librarians to literacies tutors, from those supporting the elderly to those working within particular faith communities.

Short and medium beneficiaries of this project therefore include the above-mentioned academic, practitioner and community groups, as well as all adults who are interested in talking about their own reading practices and learning more about those of others. RABiT will have a significant wider, longer-term societal impact by recognising and celebrating diverse reading aloud practices, opening up public debate on an aspect of cultural life so rarely discussed; enhancing communities by valuing regional, linguistic and faith traditions; and influencing educational discourses of reading, and the curricula and assessments they produce.

The artefacts produced over the two-year funded project (website, community/practitioner articles, Next Steps Guides, Mass Observation Project directive, and sound recordings in the British Library Sound Archive) and the monograph written within two years of the end of the project, will produce continued and longer term engagement with the aims of the project, allowing more people, for various reasons and with various professional backgrounds, to explore contemporary reading aloud practices and what they mean for how we understand, research, teach, use and celebrate reading in the early twenty-first century.