Studying By Reading Aloud Or Silently, Which Works Best?

What is the best way to study for you? Many people study by reading silently, others, on the other hand, do it aloud. If you’re one of the latest, you’re likely to walk around the place you’re studying while reciting what you’ve read or learned. In some cases, you may even start a conversation with yourself. But, which is more effective: study by reading aloud or silently?

What we suggest is that both options be used, because as we will discover below,  when we read aloud and silently, we potentiate different aspects. Even if we prioritize and give more importance to one of them, we will see what each one brings and hinders.

Studying in silence and visual memory

When we study in silence, the ideal is to do a first reading in which the subject of the text we are reading is more or less clear. However, this cannot be left alone. After this first reading, it is important to underline the important ideas,  stop at what is not clear and reflect or seek information that dispels doubts.

It is important to underline and make notes, and even use highlighter pens with various colors, because they favor our visual memory  (remembering the location of information facilitates the process of retrieving it from our memory: retrieval). Furthermore, the use of color also makes us pay more attention, focus on what we had previously judged to be most important.

The importance of studying by reading silently lies in the fact that we can focus on what we are reading, but if we don’t do more than just read, this action won’t do us much good. The reason lies in the fact that  we need to actively work with the element of study, make it our own. Not only reading, but also writing, noting, putting with our words what we are assimilating. Here is the crux of the matter and why studying by reading aloud has so much to offer us.

Studying by reading aloud consolidates knowledge

When we study by reading aloud, it is as if the ear becomes part of the experience. Cognitive abilities related to memory, attention, understanding are awakened… This act activates the ability to retain and store information that our brain has.

However, as we mentioned well in the silent reading, there is something else… Is  n’t it much easier to hear an explanation from other people’s mouths than reading their notes? This happens because we give our personal value to what we read, we explain it with different words, but beyond that, we can clarify doubts, question, debate. This enriches the study and favors our memorization process.

When we study by reading aloud, we make connections. We suddenly put  together what we’re saying with something we’d read on another page. We make a mental scheme that can complement the silent scheme or the reading we had done without speaking aloud. It is an ideal contribution that sharpens knowledge and imprints it on our minds.

The benefits of listening to yourself

Colin MacLeod and Noah Farrin are great researchers who have dedicated themselves to studying the effect of producing aloud and its relationship to learning. For this reason, since 2010 they have been dedicating themselves to the topic, and one of their researches was published in Memory  magazine  with the title “The benefits of listening to yourself”.

In this research, they had the collaboration of 100 students from the University of Waterloo, in Canada, who were given 80 words that they had to reproduce aloud. The vast majority of them wrote down on a paper the words they remembered, just in case.

Then, they went to another test, but before doing it they had to choose  4 different ways to remember the words. One was to read them silently, another to listen to the words recorded on a tape by someone else, another to listen to words recorded in your own voice, and the last to read them aloud.

The results were very revealing and the authors called them the “production effect”. After two weeks of the test, the participants received a list of words where they had to identify if they were the ones they had read or memorized. Those who had read the words aloud in the first experiment responded better.

However, it  was also found that listening to self recordings helps. However, the recordings made by other people had an effectiveness that ranked third. So the more personal the recording, the more we will remember it.

While studying by reading aloud is a good option, we can’t rule out the others – usually what we try to do is memorize meaningful material, not single words.  A good combination of all of them can bring satisfactory results.

For some people it will be better to study by reading silently, record yourself reading the text and then listen to yourself. Others will choose to read aloud from the beginning and then study in silence by writing or sketching what they have learned. On this side, the ideal is that, using what the research has told us, each person adopts the methodology with which he/she obtains the greatest income.