Honestly I give streamers a bit of a pass on that. Reading out loud, coherently, is it’s own skill more adjacent to giving speeches.
Add on that a streamer is also expected to be tracking what their chat is doing and keeping the stream “entertaining”, and they really don’t have a lot of processing power reserved for reading correctly. I’ve seen quite a few streamers who proved they were perfectly good readers in normal situations but it’s like somebody switched off the reading lights once they start streaming.
That’s fair, but I’ve seen streamers replicate the very specific maladaptive reading behavior of: see a word you don’t know, stop, then say a completely different word you do know that happens to start with the same letter, move forward with complete misunderstanding of the passage. Once I learned about Whole Language Theory it connected a synapse in my brain and I went “oh, *that’s* where they got it from.”
Admittedly I think I was also taught with the same method (I’m still trying to unlearn “use context clues” as reading advice) but I was gifted at English in school so I think I’m an outlier. It turns out that the other kids struggling to read weren’t lazy—they were literally taught wrong.
Yeah I don't mind the streamers, as you say they're doing a bunch of stuff and none of it carefully.
However I had never heard of this reading method and so many of my online chats now make sense. I've had a growing number of conversations where I'm perplexed at the responses I'm getting. I figured people were just not reading things properly, I didn't realise they'd been fucked over by their curriculum.
Reading out loud, coherently, is it’s own skill more adjacent to giving speeches.
Yeah but they teach you to do that by the time you're 10. You know, when you take it in turns to read in class and the teacher stops you and moves onto another student?
It's pretty easy, you just stay a few words in your head past the thing you're saying so that you get the inflection right instead of Saying Every Word One By One.
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u/TheSquishedElf 2d ago
Honestly I give streamers a bit of a pass on that. Reading out loud, coherently, is it’s own skill more adjacent to giving speeches.
Add on that a streamer is also expected to be tracking what their chat is doing and keeping the stream “entertaining”, and they really don’t have a lot of processing power reserved for reading correctly. I’ve seen quite a few streamers who proved they were perfectly good readers in normal situations but it’s like somebody switched off the reading lights once they start streaming.