ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 presents an overview of the picture of contemporary adult oral reading emerging from the interviews and examples of reading aloud audio recorded between October 2017 and June 2018 and now archived in the British Library Sound Archive. This includes discussion of methodological challenges and provides an analysis examining the range of practices for different purposes and across different life domains. We then ‘go deeper’ into the interview data in two ways: through four case studies of reading aloud in individual lives and through three conversations exploring: ‘the ownership of the word,’ ‘reinforcement’ and ‘crossword Sundays, crazy poems, comfort and the edge of your seat.’ This chapter also concludes Part 1 of the book.
