When a teacher listens to a student reading aloud, he or she is often using the activity to identify more persistent problems of, for example, 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. Underhill (op. cit.) finds that RA can be a powerful tool for diagnosing a student’s comprehension of the text. The intonation the student uses can indicate where understanding is not complete.