ABSTRACT Students in middle school and high school can use audiobooks to improve fluency, expand vocabulary and develop comprehension. Focusing less on word recognition allows readers to focus solely on the meaning behind an author’s words. This provides an opportunity for many students, including those with special needs, to experience the same books as the other students. Specific skills that can be demonstrated on using audiobooks include recalling details, understanding the sequence of events better and drawing logical conclusions. For proficient readers, audiobooks present opportunities to develop comprehension skills and strategies in critical and creative thinking. Audiobooks in most cases do not act as alternatives to reading books, …show more content…
A typical classroom would have a small group of students, or an individual, sitting at a Listening Center in their school listening to a teacher read aloud as they followed along in sync in an accompanying text. At the middle and high school level this idea is almost non-existent. “Even though teachers understand the importance of reading aloud to their students, providing this experience over and over with different groups of students throughout their day is often overwhelming” (Beers 33) Many teachers do not classify listening to an audiobook as reading. This perception is true only if the process of reading is defined as decoding the words in a book. However, most of the literary skills and strategies that are utilized by audiobook readers while following the spoken text are exactly the same as the comprehension skills and strategies that are taught to students when they read from a textbook. The only difference is that the visual understanding of written words has now been substituted with the auditory understanding of written …show more content…
Traditional strategies, like encouraging students to read books of their choice, can no longer be thought of as the best or only solution to this problem. K. Beers strongly believed that: “The use of audiobooks with struggling, reluctant, or second-language learners is powerful since they act as a scaffold that allows students to read above their actual reading level. This is critical with older students who may still read at a beginner level. While these students must have time to practice reading at their level, they must also have the opportunity to experience the plot structures, themes, and vocabulary of most difficult books” (33). Students who are not particularly interested in reading books may be students who have not completely developed their reading skills as much as their peers, or they may be proficient readers who have lost interest in reading books. Studies by K. Beers also found that, “Audiobooks could be used to encourage adolescent students to improve reading skills, comprehension, and interest in reading books.”
Fountas, I., C., & Pinnel, G. S., (2009). When readers struggle: Teaching that works. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
In the essay titled “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading” written by John Holt and published in Reading for writers in 2013, Mr. Holt discusses why most children aren’t interested in reading. Mr. Holt spent fourteen years as an elementary school teacher. He believed classroom activities destroy a student’s learning ability. Mr. Holt never let his students say what they thought about a book. He wanted his students to look up every word they didn’t know. People can learn difficult words without looking them up in the dictionary.
On October 10th, 2017 at Springhurst Elementary School, I conducted a “Reading Interest Survey” and the “Elementary Reading Attitude Survey.” These surveys were conducted on a 1st grade student, Jax, to determine what his feelings are towards reading in different settings, what genres he prefers to read, and interests. It was found that Jax doesn’t mind reading, but prefers a few different topics. This was evident through his raw score of 30 on recreational reading, and a raw score of 31 on academic reading.
With such high numbers of adolescents falling below basic in reading, illiteracy is a battle that must be fought head on. The largest dilemma with the struggle is the number of variations that cause adolescents to become reluctant, unmotivated or struggling readers. Fortunately, a large number of strategies exist to encourage and strengthen readers of all ages, proving that adolescence is not a time to give up on faltering students. Rather, it is a time to evaluate and intervene in an effort to turn a reluctant reader into an avid one (or near enough). Ultimately, educators must learn to properly assess a student’s strengths and weaknesses (Curtis, 2009) and pair them with the proper intervention techniques. If one method does not work, countless others exist to take its place.
This activity suits the child’s current stage of oral development will interest them and aid in them progressing in their oral development. Children at this stage of development enjoy listening to stories which is good not only for their receptive skills, but also for their expressive language (Fellows and Oakley, 2014), in all four key components of spoken language. It helps with phonemes by getting the child to focus on the phonological patterns throughout the text (Fellows and Oakley, 214). Syntax knowledge allows them to observe the sentence structure and grammar in the book which allows them to develop a stronger awareness of the syntax. Visual aids in storybooks can aid in the child in the understanding of semantics (Fellows and Oakley’s), as the story is read aloud their receptive skills hear those more difficult words, when paired with a visual cue such as a picture in the book the child understands better and thus they are able to gain a better understanding of how to speak these difficult words. A better understanding of pragmatics can also be gained from storybooks as they understand how people communicate in society such as greetings and asking for things (Fellows and Oakley,
Auditory learners are students that learn by being read to, so that they can get the information in their ears. They understand it better that way, they can’t understand it through their eyes. This is the importance of books being put on tape. One perspective that I learned from watching this video about students with learning disabilities is that it is very important to get to know your students, so that you can learn the best way to teach them what they need to know.
Each year as I grow old, I tend to discover and learn new things about myself as a person as well as a reader, writer and a student as a whole. My educational journey so far has been pretty interesting and full of surprises. Back in Bangladesh where I studied until high school, my interest for learning, reading or writing was so very different compared to how it has become over the years. I could relate those learning days to Richard Rodriquez’s essay “The lonely Good Company of Books”. In the essay the author says, “Friends? Reading was, at best, only a chore.”(Rodriguez, page 294). During those days I sure did feel like reading was a chore for me and how I was unable to focus and I could never understand what all those jumbled up words ever meant. It was quite a struggle for me in class when the teachers used to assign us reading homework. I felt like reading a book was more difficult or painful than trying to move a mountain. Just like how moving a mountain is impossible, trying to find an interest in reading was
Serafini, Frank, and Cyndi Giorgis. Reading Aloud and Beyond: Fostering the Intellectual Life with Older Readers. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003. Print.
Mrs. Hamm discussed that she actually uses three different programs to help teach language and literacy to her students. The first program, which is actually her favorite of the three programs, is called “Read Aloud Library”, the second program is called “Language for Learning” and the third program is called “Reading Mastery”. Mrs. Hamm discussed the programs as being very helpful tools in helping children develop their reading skills. Mrs. Hamm integrates literacy in her classroom in many different ways. In the different programs, the students read one book together in which they work on for the week by breaking down the chapters so that children can retell the story and learn th...
“According to some experts, nearly 50 per cent (of boys) describe themselves as non-readers by the time they enter secondary school.” (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2004, p. 5) Thomas Newkirk says in his interview with James Preller in In the Classroom, Interviews & Appreciations, The Gender Gap in Reading, “Reading well is so tied to school success — and to liking school — that it is unethical to write off a big percentage of boys as non-readers. It may have been possible in previous times to drop out or barely finish school and go on to good jobs. But that is not the case now.” (Preller, 2011) Evidence of the need to deal with this locally can be found in the test scores of middle school boys and circulation statistics at my middle school library. Me Read? No Way! suggests strategies to engage boys in developing literacy skills by engaging them in reading: be mindful of boys’ reading preferences; give students a voice in choosing the books you acquire; encourage boys to recommend their favourite text; and establish web-based clubs in libraries…to review books. (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2004) Michael Sullivan makes it clear that “if we want to transform boys into lifelong readers, we need to discover what makes them tick.” (Sullivan, 2004, p.36) Boys’s reading preferences are itemized by Michael Smith in Reading don’t fix no chevys. Boys are more inclined to read: informational texts, magazine and newspaper articles, comic books and graphic novels, escapism, humour, science-fiction and fantasy. (Smith, 2002, p.11) Simply put, “Buy books that the boys want to read.” (Jones, 2003, p.11)
Chapter 9 of our textbook offers great strategies that help with reading and literacy instruction for English Learners. One strategy that I connected with the most was the literature response journals. The literature response journals are “personal note-books in which students write informal comments about the stores they are reading, including their feelings and reactions to characters, setting, plot, and other aspects of the story; they are an outgrowth of learning logs and other journals (Atwell, 1984, p. 372). This strategy will allow students to describe in their own words their perspective of the story. It gives them the opportunity to help increase their skills in writing, speaking and listening. A way to help enhance this strategy is
When I was younger, I didn’t like reading much at all. I always questioned my teachers what was the purpose of reading; I never got an answer from either teacher until I was in the seventh grade. Starting junior high school was different from elementary. In seventh grade, we were in our reading class for two hours a day. I asked the teachers why didn’t we have the privilege to stay in our other classes for two hours; I never received an answer from my teachers.
While I believe every child is a reader, I do not believe every child will be enthralled with reading all the time. All students have the capability to read and enjoy reading, but just like any other hobby, interest will vary from student to student. The students in my classroom will be encouraged in their reading, be provided with choice, taught how books can take you into another world but, my students will not be forced to read. This paper will illustrate my philosophy of reading through the theories I relate to, the way I want to implement reading and writing curriculum, and the methods I will use motivate my students to read and help them become literate.
This tool, created by the Benetech Diagram Center, creates image descriptions for DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) books. Once the user uploads and creates a description, it’s available for the next reader who downloads the DAISY file. How Text-to-Speech Can Help Users with Reading Issues Using digital text with text-to-speech functionality can make the process easier for young readers. Researchers have found that the combination of seeing and hearing the text when reading improves word recognition which increases the child’s ability to pay attention and remember information. It also allows kids to focus on comprehension instead of sounding out words increasing the reader’s staying power for assignments and helps them recognize and fix errors in their own
Nowadays, many people think reading is not necessary, since there are so many sources of information and types of entertainment, such as TV, cinema and the Internet. I believe they are wrong because reading is very beneficial in many ways.