Reading Aloud: a useful learning tool?

1)Why has reading aloud been discouraged in last three decades? What are the main objections against reading aloud?
     It is commonly perceived as an unimaginative and easy time filler for the teacher.
-It is dull and boring,anxiety-provoking and of negligible benefit for the students.For the listeners, there is little to be gained from listening to a stumbling speaker.
-For the speaker, such is the working memory processing capacity required for decoding, recoding, and articulation thaht there is little room left for comprehension, yet RA is often used with the aim of comprehension.
-The linear progression of RA does not aid the development of efficient reading strategies.
-The requirement to focus on every word also slows reading speed and impedes the chunking of meaningful units.
-Reading slowly,whether aloud or silently, interferes with semantic proposition formation, therefore making it more difficult to understand what has been read.
-Students can be distracted by English spelling and make errors in the pronunciation of words they know orally.
-Reading aloud is a difficult thing to do well, even for native speakers, and this could be demotivating for students.

2)What are the possible benefits of  reading aloud?
Making accurate connections between graphemes and phonemes is vital in reading in order to speed word recognition and to help pronounce and learn new words.

3)How can reading aloud be used for diagnostic purposes?
Pronunciation , understanding of graphemic-phonemic connections, and so on, and is therefore using it as a diagnostic tool. It is the only way to check that these connections are being made correctly.

4)How can reading aloud be useful for pronunciation and prosodic features?
By reading aloud longer stretches of text, prosodic features can focused upon with the aim of raising awareness of these and practising them so that the words flow in as natural sounding a manner as possible.

5)What is the role of reading aloud in reducing student anxiety?
Controlled, imitative activities can make students feel secure enough to make their first utterances. 

6)What kind of a role does reading aloud have in developing writing skills?
RA could be useful as a proofreading technique as errors might be more easily picked up with visual and aural inputs working together.