Finally, advances in digital technology allow teachers to bring audiobooks to the classroom without depending on dated cassettes or CDs: the site Tales2Go allows teachers and schools to buy instant, simultaneous, and unlimited access to audiobooks, letting students listen to stories on multiple devices. Further, audiobooks come with “transcripts”-the book itself-which help support literacy.
William Weil, who with his wife founded the audiobook steaming service for schools, Tales2Go, said that even kids surrounded by articulate adults benefit from hearing the complex words and sentences found in novels and nonfiction correct usage is often lacking in ordinary conversation. “Every modality and learning type can benefit from audiobooks,” Alicea said.Īudiobooks and podcasts are popular ways of bringing stories to students, and each mode brings something unique to the class. And audiobooks help all readers improve their fluency: Alicea sometimes plays a paragraph, and invites her students to read it aloud and try to match the narrator’s pacing, tone, and expression. Many kids go on to read the books after hearing them read aloud.
Absent the need to decipher each word, reread for content, and then picture the story, these struggling readers listening to stories soon fall for the book itself, and are able to participate in class discussions about plot and character.
#How to read an audiobook s movie
She encourages kids to make a movie in their minds while listening-to visualize the story they’re hearing. “It almost seems to open up a world of reading for them,” Alicea said. Gurganus Elementary School in Havelock, North Carolina, audiobooks have been most transformative for those kids who hate to read. “It pulled her in and kept her attention,” she said.įor Ashley Alicea, a third grade teacher at W.J. Scheuer said her 8 th grade daughter, who struggles with ADD, listened to Walter Isaacson’s massive biography of Steve Jobs-something she would have given up on in written form-while doodling in a notebook. For children with already abundant vocabularies, listening to stories with more complex language expands their stable of words and exposes them to more sophisticated stories. Well-told stories can also fill the vocabulary gap for those students who haven’t been exposed to a rich array of words over their lives. “It provides an emotional connection to the narrator,” Scheuer said, which in turn motivates kids to continue listening.
#How to read an audiobook s free
While books require readers to decode every word, stories told aloud free up the listener to connect with the story and the storyteller. And professor Nina Kraus at Northwestern University, who explores the complexity of sound processing in the brain, has found that a variety of factors, including income level and a mother’s education, play a role in how well children process sound-which in turn affects reading ability.Įducators like Mary Ann Scheuer, who has taught with and promoted audiobooks in the classroom - and began her own blog Great Kid Books - sees how exposing kids to the spoken word via rich stories improves literacy. Studies carried out at Stanford showed a gap in vocabularies between children of the well-off and those with lower socioeconomic status is apparent in children as young as 18 months. Work by Betty Hart and Todd Risley found that the vocabularies of three-year-olds were predictive of their language and reading skills at age ten.
Research underscores the link between listening and literacy. Being able to listen well and remember what was said was an essential part of the oral tradition. Before books became the main means of conveying information, spoken word was the vehicle for sharing culture, tradition and values. The continuation of those experiences depended on the attention of the listener. Teachers and parents who read aloud to children have long known that good stories have the power to captivate the most restless of kids. Scheuer recalls the boy saying, "I read it so much faster by myself after I listened to it!." She added, “It was a game changer for him.” On Scheuer’s recommendation, the teacher introduced the student to the same story via an audiobook he listened to the story, and then sat alone with the book to read on his own. The child was a grade-level behind in reading, and while the rest of the class could sit quietly for 30 minutes, engrossed in Horrible Harry, this child began to act out after ten frustrating minutes with the book. School librarian Mary Ann Scheuer remembers a second grader who couldn’t keep up with the class during reading time.