RECENT NEWS: THE CASE FOR LISTENING

Discussing strategies to use with a struggling reader with whom we both worked, a resource specialist at a local school told me that she let a struggling reader listen to audio books, but insisted (and asked his parents to enforce that insistence) that he also get the text version and always follow along.

Julie Moncton, one of the owners of the fabulous All Ears Audio Books in San Jose, wrote to tell me about parents coming in, “kids in tow,” saying, “'I need an audio book for my son. He has problems with reading. Nope—no audio book for my other kids. They read just fine.”

Sometimes it seems that audio books get no respect, despite the fact that they have been a fairly successful branch of the publishing industry. Many adults I know who stress the importance of children learning to read do much, if not all, of their own “reading” listening to audio books.

Personally, I used to classify myself as a non-audio book person. I told myself I just couldn’t get into them. It was difficult for me to maintain orientation, so much easier on the page, where you can backtrack or pause without all that effort.

Then my sister pointed out that using audio books had increased her listening and focusing skills. Maybe, I realized, the problem wasn’t audio books, it was me. Putting effort and purpose into listening, I have begun to reap benefits, just as I do from reading text.

In my work with kids, I've seen audio books open up new worlds, not to mention develop skills that are applicable to all sorts of learning. The reasons that we have for reading text—enjoyment, edification, and gaining knowledge—are just as valid for listening to it. And there is an added benefit: the deep, inherited pleasure that comes from having someone tell you a story.

Many educators don’t place enough value on audio books (or for that matter, reading aloud to kids beyond the third grade), and view them solely as an aid for readers having difficulty with the process. Really, audio books are another, equally important, avenue for content. The kind of “literacy” involved should be respected in its own right, independent from the skills involved with decoding off the page.

Kids who enjoy listening to a book should be able to enjoy it. Kids who have trouble with decoding and fluency should have access to content to which they might not otherwise have access. Not being able to read does not mean you are unintelligent.

In a presentation by John Ratey, author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, he suggested that we stop paying so much attention to the right/left brain paradigm and start thinking about a front/back model.

I find such a model particularly valuable when thinking about reading. To make a simple distinction, the back brain is where sensory input is processed. The front brain is where we set goals and monitor ourselves as we move toward them, where we evaluate our performance and regulate our reaction to that evaluation.

The front brain is what makes humans different than most of the rest of the animal kingdom. It’s bigger, better, and inchoate until rather late in our lives. The fact that it is not fully organized until well into adulthood is probably a good explanation of why car insurance is more expensive for teenagers than it is for me.

If the front brain is functioning well, higher order cognition is deliberate and measured. To think in profound and sophisticated ways, we need to take the time to reflect on incoming information. The tortoise will beat the hare.

Compare that to the back brain, where speed is a far more valuable commodity. The back brain gets us the information, the raw data we use for our thinking. The reader who automatically processes words, whose back brain instantly recognizes letter and word shapes and the symbol to sound and etymological principles underneath, will not have to waste front brain time monitoring the critical task of literacy called decoding, and can use the saved mental energy for critical thinking. Advantage: hare.

It seems clear that back brain weakness, a lack of automaticity in processing sensory input, doesn’t tell us anything about the front brain. Poor readers can be great thinkers. For that matter, great readers can be poor thinkers. So why should poor readers be denied content that matches their front brain capabilities?

If you can’t automatically process written language, but can automatically process oral language, why should you be denied access to that language? And please, I’m not advocating that we give up on teaching reading skills, so tremendously important.

I work with an eight-year-old girl whose reading of low level material can be halting and laborious. Yet she has listened to Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series, and avidly discusses the books, aimed at nine to twelve-year-olds, with full understanding, making connections to Greek mythology and following her curiosity to find out more.

Let’s show some respect for the audio book as its own medium. And let’s show some respect for kids who demonstrate their intelligence as they interact with that medium.

In a piece on NPR extolling the virtues of audio books, children’s author Neil Gaiman contended that critic Harold Bloom’s argument—“deep reading really demands the inner ear as well as the outer ear”—was “astonishingly unconvincing.” Gaiman countered that “you can have a close and perfectly valid relationship with the text when you hear it.”

Let's show some respect for that relationship.