HEARD
ANY GOOD BOOKS LATELY? - It works!
by Deborah Locke
Audiobooks saved my life, I'm convinced.
Four years of commuting from Westbrook, Maine, to Boston, working on a master's
degree in children's literature, nearly ended in disaster when I fell asleep at
the wheel. I woke up jouncing diagonally across the median strip, headed for the
Pearly Gates they were orange and read "Grossman's." Having survived that near-death
experience, I had a new cassette player installed in my car and began combing
area libraries for audiobooks. Music in the car had always lulled me into drowsiness;
a good story on audio kept me alert and alive. When our school district provided
the opportunity to apply for minigrants for technology in libraries, the omnipresent
Walkman worn by so many of my teenage patrons gave me the inspiration to substitute
great young adult literature for Twisted Sister and Alice in Chains. I applied
for a grant to purchase 20 - 25 new audiobooks and four personal tape players.
My stated objectives in the grant were:
- To introduce teenagers to
audiobooks as a source of enjoyment and recreation;
- To stimulate
an interest in reading young adult books;
- To allow less-able
readers to experience the books their peers enjoy reading;
- To
build vocabulary and enhance the appreciation of language.
When the
audiobooks arrived, I loaded them onto a book cart and went peddling in study
halls, giving brief audio booktalks and distributing title lists. I attended an
English department meeting to share ideas and suggestions for using audiobooks
in the classroom. In the library we displayed audio titles in a highly visible
browsing bin near the circulation desk. The local news-paper did a nice feature
on our audiobook collection (although we were also spoofed in an editorial cartoon!).
By far the most valuable asset to our audio program was an innovative
and enthusiastic teacher, Cynthia Graves, who was always open to trying new techniques
in the class-room. Finding herself challenged by an unusually diverse class that
ranged from advanced readers to foreign students and teenaged girls interested
only in painting their nails, Cynthia planned a unit that would immerse her students
in audiobooks. She claims it was the most successful thing she's ever done, finding
that listening to books in audio format effectively unified instruction for the
whole class. Below are a few of her assignments and projects. Although originally
prepared for high-school students, many are easily adaptable for the lower grades.
- Listening journals: Have students describe new characters as they
appear in the story line, as well as major events as they unfold, and then ask
them to surmise what the motivations were behind those events.
- Character
letters: Invite students to write a letter from one character in the audiobook
to another, a letter that might have been written in the context of the book and
that might have changed the outcome of the story.
- Art days:
After experiencing a work of literature that was transferred from a written to
a spoken medium, ask students to experiment with translating the story into yet
another medium by creating original covers for the book, movie posters for an
imagined film version, and portraits of the characters.
- Audiobook
reviews: Have students prepare two styles of book review, one modeled on a traditional
book review as in the New York Times and other newspapers, and another based on
an audiobook review, such as is found in KLIATT, AudioFile, or Booklist, which
assesses the quality of the audio production in terms of characterization, vocal
color, tone, pace, music, and sound effects. Compare the reviews and discuss how
they highlight different elements of the story.
- Vocabulary
lists: For students who read haltingly or for whom English is a second language,
creating lists of new words as they are heard is highly effective. Students hear
skilled readers introduce unfamiliar words with fluidity and a natural tempo and
can be confident that they are pronouncing the new words correctly.
It
quickly becomes obvious that activities used successfully with printed literature
often work just as well with audiobooks. For students with weak reading skills,
however, the audiobook may provide their very first positive experience with literature.
The drama created by an effective narrator draws them into the book, and their
ability to enjoy and comprehend the story independently can have a profound long-term
impact.
Cynthia's success has spread, influencing other teachers
in the school to experiment with integrating the audio format into literature
study. For some classes, one of the free-choice reading assignments each year
involves an audiobook. Students assigned a historical fiction novel for U.S. history
have the option of selecting an unabridged audiobook. One teacher has two students
share a cassette player to listen to an audiobook together and then write indepen
dently from the respective points of view of two different characters. Other teachers
use portions of titles such as Natalie Babbitt's Tuck Everlasting, Toni Morrison's
Jazz, or Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart to illustrate such literary techniques
as irony, rhythm, or dialect.
Not all students will immediately
be comfortable with the audio medium. Immersed in a multimedia world of television
and the Internet, our students receive little practice in pure listening. Visual
learners may find their first listening assignments a challenge. Teachers may
wish to begin by using selected scenes to illustrate aspects of an assigned book,
short stories such as Don Gallo's collections for young adults, or read-alongs
where students use both the book and the audiobook in tandem.
Some teachers will stubbornly resist audiobooks as the "lazy way" of reading.
The best weapons against these resisters are publicity for successful classroom
audio projects, the enthusiastic endorsement of student listeners, and subtle
and constant "fertilizing" with good ideas for implementing audiobooks in the
classroom.
In the library, audiobooks have become an accepted
and essential part of our annual book and audio-visual budget. We've continued
to add to the number of personal tape players, and supply long-lasting rechargeable
batteries. Student requests for titles not in our own collection have been satisfactorily
met through interlibrary loan, and those requested titles become the seed for
our next purchase.
Deborah Locke is a librarian at Westbrook High
School in Westbrook, Maine, and has spoken about using audiobooks in the classroom
at national and state library conferences. She and Cynthia Graves were recently
featured as "Educators of the Month" on the Audio Bookshelf Web site.
Web Connections
Permission to reprint "Heard Any Books Lately?"
by Deborah Locke (v.11 no.2) granted by Book
Links: Connecting Books, Libraries, and Classrooms, published by the American
Library Association.
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