Should you read out loud in a new language?

Do you remember words better if you say them aloud?

Memory researchers call it the production effect. In a 2010 series of experiments by Colin MacLeod and colleagues at the University of Waterloo, people studied lists in which some words were read aloud and others silently. Recognition was better for the spoken words, by roughly 12–20 percentage points in hits in the first experiments. Even silently mouthing a word helped. Saying the same response every time did not, which suggests the benefit comes from making each word distinctive.

There is a catch. The effect is strongest when spoken and silent items are mixed, and MacLeod's team initially found it only in that situation. Later meta-analyses by Jonathan Fawcett and colleagues found a moderate benefit for recognition even when one group read everything aloud and another read everything silently, but no such effect on free recall. So reading a whole page aloud gives a smaller boost than picking out the words that matter and saying those.

Hearing yourself seems to be part of it. Forrin and MacLeod compared four ways of studying words: reading them aloud, hearing a recording of your own voice saying them, hearing someone else's voice, and reading silently. Memory followed exactly that order, from best to worst.

Second-language studies point the same way. Icht and Mama taught Hebrew speakers new Esperanto words and found a memory advantage for the words they had said aloud at every interval tested, up to two weeks, with less forgetting over time. Brown and Roembke, testing German–English and English–German bilinguals, found the production effect was larger in their second language than in their first.

Does reading aloud help or hurt comprehension?

Here the evidence is thin and pulls in different directions. Most studies are small and use short texts:

A larger correlational study by Eun Hee Jeon tested 255 Korean secondary-school students and found that how fluently they read a passage aloud explained 20.9% of the variation in their silent reading comprehension. That shows the two skills are linked, not that reading aloud causes better understanding.

Speed is the clearest cost. In first-language research reviewed by Marc Brysbaert, adults read aloud at about 183 words a minute against about 238 silently for non-fiction. Reading aloud also splits your attention between sounding out the words and following the story. For reading a lot of text, silent reading wins; for working closely on a short passage, reading aloud earns its place.

Will reading aloud improve your pronunciation?

Only up to a point, and only if you know what the words should sound like. A 2015 overview by Bassetti, Escudero and Hayes-Harb notes that spelling can help learners produce and learn new sounds, but can also pull them away from the target pronunciation. Reading aloud from text alone means guessing at sounds from letters, and a guess repeated every day becomes a habit. That is a reasonable risk, not a proven outcome: we found no study showing that reading aloud fixes errors in place.

Practice with a model works better. In Foote and McDonough's 2017 study, 16 learners shadowed recorded dialogues at least four times a week for at least ten minutes over eight weeks. They improved on every speaking measure except accent: listeners found them easier to understand and more fluent. Our page on shadowing explains the technique.

Contos has no audio. It is a reading app, so pair it with recordings when pronunciation is the goal: a dictionary with sound for single words, and podcasts or video at your level for rhythm and intonation. Our page on reading or listening first covers how the two fit together.

How should you read a chapter aloud?

Paul Nation describes repeated reading as a fluency exercise: a text of roughly 50–300 words in which every word is already known, read aloud three to five times, ideally to a listener so that the focus stays on meaning. Free Contos chapters at A1 average 171 words and at A2 242 words across Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese in the Contos library (October 2026), which falls inside that range. At B1 and B2 the chapters run longer, so pick one scene.

Dialogue is the best material, because it carries the intonation of questions and exclamations. Two short lines from free A1 chapters:

1. Read the chapter silently first and tap anything you don't know.
2. Check the pronunciation of new words against a recording before you say them.
3. Read the dialogue aloud, then the whole chapter, two or three times.
4. On the last read, aim to sound like the character, not like someone reading a list.

Nation suggests around 150 words a minute as a good oral reading speed for learners, which puts an average A1 chapter at just over a minute aloud.