A BRIDGE TO LITERACY:
CREATING LIFELONG READERS THROUGH AUDIOBOOKS

by Denise Marchionda

Reading begins with the spoken word. Children acquire their first reading words from daily interactions with adults. Through conversations, children soon learn that spoken words are the same words written in their environment, and the miraculous process of reading begins! This is why emergent readers can easily recognize signs along the road such as "STOP" or restaurant marquees such as "McDonald's." Reading instruction builds on this oral language. Parents or caregivers who regularly talk and read to a child are the first, and best, teachers of reading.
 
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that parents read to their children daily from six months of age. They also say that reading aloud to children helps stimulate brain development and fuels a close emotional relationship between parent and child. Regularly enjoying books together and talking about them can do more to teach a child to read and to improve school success than anything else. Audiobooks, too, can be shared and enjoyed, and be part of the "learning to read" process.
 
When children enter school and begin the formal process of learning to read, audiobooks easily can be used to supplement the curriculum and can become part of at-home leisure reading. Although the cuddly sharing of books should never be replaced at any age, teachers and parents can provide a variety of audiobooks to be companions of--or replacements for--the printed text. Especially when books become longer and more involved, audiobooks can help readers expand their skills in many ways. "Years ago, audiobooks were promoted for special needs or reluctant readers," says Karen Harris, former professor of library science at the University of New Orleans. "But some of the most enthusiastic listeners are the best readers." Many of her college students were initially skeptical about using audiobooks for reading and teaching, telling her, "I like real books." Now these very students have been seduced by audiobooks and are extending that experience to their own students.
 
Reading a text along with listening to an audiobook is one way to provide a good model of reading for a developmental reader. Audiobooks offer suitable models for proper enunciation and inflection. In school, students are often asked to "read aloud" for their classmates. Some accomplished and practiced readers do so in high fashion. But not all students are equally verbose. Some children have had limited exposure to good reading models.
 
Audiobooks can fill in the gap. Listening to practiced orators, while reading along with the printed text, allows students to see how punctuation is used for inflection, pause, or stops. Fluency, the ability to read with no breaks in the narrative with clear and well-timed enunciation, is also an acquired reading skill that can be honed while listening. A practiced narrator on an audiobook is a great model for students to learn from and emulate. The more sophisticated reader can also benefit from using this strategy by picking up the subtleties of a text, as well as different emphases, and interpretive and narrative styles.
 
For any level reader, child to adult, audiobooks can help support vocabulary acquisition. Listening vocabulary is often at a higher level than a person's reading and speaking vocabulary. Children who listen to a book being read while following along with the printed text can both see and hear new words, and the new words are more likely to be remembered. If a book is a bit above a reader's current level of reading, an audiobook presents the correct pronunciation, the book shows the correct spelling, and the context reveals the meaning. Therefore, a solid bridge is created for learning new vocabulary.
 
Audiobooks encourage active listening and critical thinking skills--skills necessary for reading comprehension. Dr. Junko Yokota, professor of reading and language at National-Louis University in Illinois, says, "Listening comprehension is a skill that receives little attention in teaching, yet it is a highly needed skill throughout life." Audiobooks are a great tool for teaching critical listening. Listening to audiobooks alone mimics and parallels the silent reading process; prior knowledge is interacting with the story, along with the development and use of vocabulary, syntax, and semantics.
 
When presented with classic literature or archaic and complex structures of language, for example, Shakespeare, using an audiobook as a guide can be extremely helpful to understanding and deciphering the meaning of the language when heard orally. Shakespeare's works were meant to be heard and performed! Therefore, the audiobook presentation is a wonderful way to hear the proper names and uncommon words pronounced correctly. Not always easily understood when seen alone in print, antiquated words may not be spelled phonetically, creating difficulty in reading. Again, a bridge is built for comprehension and awareness of the subtleties of reading. Mary Dalton Howard, an eleventh-grade teacher at Elizabeth High School in Plaza Elizabeth, New Jersey, says, "An English teacher loves Hawthorne and Steinbeck, but let's face it, no one else does." Yet with the unabridged recording of THE GRAPES OF WRATH for example, she was able to successfully teach the entire book in depth. She also uses audiobooks to efficiently cover sophisticated material.
 
Last year in Dalton's World Literature course, her students simultaneously read and listened to their choice of WILD SWANS: THREE DAUGHTERS OF CHINA, by Jung Chang; MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA, by Arthur S. Golden; THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS, by Arundhati Roy; or THE POISONWOOD BIBLE, by Barbara Kingsolver. Then they wrote to the ambassador of the country of their choice and told him or her what they learned from the book. Stories like these, which take place in exotic locales or which have characters who speak with accents, are also facilitated by the auditory presentation. These titles, or other books set in a different time period or in a faraway place, are presented in a realistic and authentic manner. Christopher Paul Curtis, author of THE WATSONS GO TO BIRMINGHAM--1963 and BUD, NOT BUDDY, was interviewed for Listening Library's audio presentation Poised for Literacy, A Guide to Using Children's Audiobooks, and said that people spoke differently in various decades and that audiobooks have the advantage of presenting the actual way people spoke. "The tape allows you to hear what the author was trying to present at the time."
 
The advantage of using an audiobook with unfamiliar subject matter is that if listeners still cannot understand what they have read, they can replay sections to better understand passages or just enjoy the narrative. THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN, the perennial Twain favorite, is a good example of a book that is fraught with dialogue that is almost indecipherable. If able to hear the dialogue while reading, the reader can understand more fully the humor, nuance, and characterization of Huck and his pals. The lone silent reader who is not familiar with the patterns of old Southern speech and dialect may easily lose the humor when struggling to decipher the text. Humorous literature can lose its punch if it is not delivered with proper timing, emphasis and pause for readers to understand the humor. Satire and irony are also more understood when read properly. Assisted by the audiobook presentation, the reader is free to enjoy the flow of the language and appreciate the humor as it was intended.
 
Audiobooks can generate excitement for the nonreader. Dr. Junko Yokota says, "Audiobooks can be used to play a particularly salient part of a text to listeners who might then be interested in reading the whole book. How could anyone resist Redwall after hearing some of those exciting passages from the full-cast version? But the book itself is so thick that some find it daunting." Cynthia Graves, a retired high school teacher at Westbrook High School in Westbrook, Maine, agrees and says that audiobooks have allowed some of her students to successfully get through a book. "Before the audiobooks were introduced, some students didn't take reading seriously. The audiobooks encouraged them, and they found them to be very user-friendly." Graves used audiobooks often in her regular and honors English classes. "Can we listen now?" was a common refrain in her classroom. "The kids looked forward to coming in and listening to their books, and it gave me time to individually conference with each one." She asked her students to take notes while listening, keep a running journal, or write a summary at the end of each class. "Students become more focused and make progress in long-term memory. Developmentally, it is worth the time it takes in class," says Graves.
 
Most importantly, listening to audiobooks can successfully promote a reading habit and create a lifelong reader. Parents, teachers, librarians, or friends who are making audiobooks available to children and others are giving them the most precious gifts of reading, literacy, and knowledge. They are also giving them the ability to read and experience literature anywhere, anytime, anyplace. A most precious gift indeed.
 
©AudioFile Publication, Portland, Maine
AudioFile Magazine, August/September 2001

 
Dr. Denise Marchionda is a former Assistant Professor of Education at Notre Dame College in Manchester, NH. She has been an advocate of audiobooks for many years, for both education and recreation, and believes that an active mind leads to an active life.