Listening While You Read: Combining Audio with English Books
Hiroki Obara · DeveloperABC GeorgeHow-To
In 2014, Anna C-S. Chang and Sonia Millett published an experiment with audio graded readers in ELT Journal (vol. 68, no. 1). Three groups of second language students worked through ten Level 1 graded readers over 13 weeks. One group only read. One read while listening to the audio. One only listened.
The question was how their ability to understand spoken English changed. Everyone took a 60-item listening test before the study and a 180-item test on three texts afterwards. All test passages were played at the same speech rate, and each was heard only once.
The group that read while listening showed the most consistent and significant gains, compared with both the reading-only and the listening-only groups.
Following a text with your eyes while hearing the same words is usually called reading while listening. This post looks at what research has found about it.
How many words stay
A related question is whether reading while listening helps you pick up new words.
Ronan Brown, Rob Waring and Sangrawee Donkaewbua compared how much English vocabulary learners acquired incidentally from stories in three modes: reading, reading while listening, and listening (Reading in a Foreign Language, vol. 20, no. 2, 2008). They chose three sets of 28 words from four frequency bands and tested them right after the sessions, one week later and three months later.
New words were learned incidentally in all three modes, but most words were not learned. Words that appeared more often in the text were more likely to be learned and less likely to be forgotten. On a test of unprompted recall, learners kept the meaning of only 1 of the 28 words on average after three months in either of the reading modes, and none in the listening-only mode.
What the research adds up to
Stuart Webb, Takumi Uchihara and Akifumi Yanagisawa pooled studies of second language vocabulary learning from meaning-focused input (Language Teaching, vol. 56, no. 2, 2023). The analysis covered 24 studies with 2,771 participants.
On immediate and delayed tests, learners picked up 17% and 15% of the target words from reading, 15% and 13% from listening, and 13% and 17% from reading while listening. The authors describe the gains from these three modes as similar.
Reading while listening produced the largest effect on delayed tests. The authors point out, though, that only two reading while listening studies included delayed tests. On immediate tests, there were 17 reading studies and 6 listening studies, against 2 for reading while listening. Their position is that research on reading while listening is still thin and its results should be read with caution.
Free audiobooks
LibriVox is a non-profit project in which volunteers record public domain books chapter by chapter and release the audio online for free. It has no ads, and the recordings themselves are in the public domain.
There are separate posts on when to move from graded readers to original books, on how to finish an English book, and on using translation while you read.
Read-aloud in ABC George
I make ABC George, a free iPhone and iPad app for reading Project Gutenberg books with a built-in dictionary. It has no ads and no in-app purchases.
Press and hold a word to bring up the selection menu, then tap “Speak” to hear the selection read aloud. You can drag the handles to select a single word, a sentence or a paragraph. Change the speed under “Speaking speed” in Settings, and tap “Try it” to hear a sample. Words in your word book can be read aloud too.
“Look up” gives you the meaning, and each word you look up is saved to your word book with the sentence you met it in. Getting to your first book is covered in Getting Started with ABC George.
