Listening While Reading 🎧📖

The Reading Series: The Intersection of Listening and Reading Comprehension

For the fourth year in a row, I’ve observed some of my sixth-graders reading ‘shaved ice’ as ‘sherbet ice’ aloud, and they give me perplexed looks when I explain my recurring spiel on how it’s not quite the same thing – dessert or pronunciation-wise.

different kinds of Japanese shaved ice

Like any normal person growing up, I’ve made countless pronunciation errors. The most embarrassing one etched in my memory is my mispronunciation of the word ‘boutique’, which I read aloud as ‘booty queue’. This caused my mother to burst into uncontrollable laughter. While learning Japanese, I’ve also made mistake after mistake. However, I’ve found that the strategy of listening while reading helps because it makes me hear how things are actually said.

Listening While Reading

The “Listening While Reading” strategy is a method often used in language learning and literacy development. It combines auditory and visual learning by having the learner listen to a fluent reading of a text while simultaneously reading along with the audio.

How it works:

• A learner selects a text, which can be a book, article, or any other written material.

• The learner then finds an audio version of the same text. This could be an audiobook, a recording by a teacher, or any other high-quality audio recording.

• The learner begins playing the audio and follows along in the written text.

• If the learner encounters a difficult word or phrase, they can pause the audio to examine it more closely in the text.

Benefits:

• Improve Pronunciation: It can help us understand the correct pronunciation and intonation of words and sentences.

• Enhance Listening Skills: It can improve our listening skills and help us get used to the rhythm and speed of the language.

• Increase Vocabulary: It helps in expanding our vocabulary as we are more likely to remember words that we’ve heard and read at the same time.

• Improve Reading Comprehension: The combination of reading and listening can enhance us understanding of the text. We are more likely to understand complex sentences and grammar structures.

• Facilitates Language Immersion: It mimics the experience of language immersion, which is one of the most effective ways to learn a new language.

Some Foreign Language Learning Research

In a study by Blum, Koskinen, Tenant, Parker, Straub, and Curry (1995), they compared home-based repeated reading of books with home reading and listening to audiotaped books for 19 weeks on five international children with limited linguistic knowledge. The study showed that participants significantly benefited from simultaneous reading and listening to audiotaped books, becoming progressively more fluent in reading increasingly difficult texts.

Another notable one is Brown, Waring, and Donkaewbua (2008), where they experimented with vocabulary learning through three methods: reading, listening while reading (LWR), and listening only (LO). They involved 35 Japanese college students studying three graded readers. The results revealed that students learned the most words via the LWR mode, followed by reading only, and lastly LO. Additionally, students found the LWR mode to be the most sustainable and entertaining method to learn. A similar study by just Brown (2007) also reported comparable results, where 58% of students preferred RWL, 40% preferred reading only, and just 2% favored LO.

Extensive Reading

Putting on an audiobook and pulling up a copy on my Kindle is one of the ways I can actually sit still for a prolonged period of time and push through the mental fatigue that reading in a second language brings. In fact, it is one of my favorite ways to extensively read thicker books! If you haven’t read my article on how reading boosts language learning yet, please check it out as it is the first article in my reading series.

Thank you so much for reading! I'll see you next Sunday!