Fostering a Love of Books
Audiobooks help students by allowing them to focus on the content and imagery of the story rather than expending mental energy on decoding. Audiobooks make the books alive in an authentic, vivid way. The readers of Audiobooks are actors who set the appropriate tone for the book. They utilize accent, different voices and dramatization as called for in a way that makes it a pleasure to listen to.
Improving Comprehension
Barbra Wilson, a leading reading expert stresses that the inability to read has broad sweeping ramifications on learning and the ability of a student to reach his/her full potential.. Providing students with reading difficulty with grade level content and expose them to academic vocabulary and the language of books that can make a tremendous difference in their comprehension. Many students with learning disabilities are very bright. They face a critical obstacle to gaining access to information that will broaden their horizons' and quench there curiosity by there inability to read. Audiobooks effectively bypass that obstacle in a simple, accessible way.
Improving Self Confidence
Through audiobooks, students with reading disabilities are given a key to unlock the magical world of stories so they can experience getting lost in a book just like their peers, thereby boosting there confidence. They can feel proud of their ability to independently build a diverse knowledge base and having of read the new book that is all the rage and speculate with their high achieving friends about who should play the part in the movie (and than criticize the movie as not being near as good as the book).
Improving Reading
Research conducted by Esteves and Witten in 2011 shows that assisted reading using audiobooks in combination with the written texts significantly improves reading fluency over reading alone. This is likely because students with reading difficulties require increased exposure to literature in order to automatically recognize and recall words, and spending time with texts promotes overall reading ability (Allington 2009). The combined exposure proved to enhance the effect of that time with the text.
