Kindle and Audible.com have lanched a new product that combines listening and reading and they call it immersion reading. Yes listening enhances reading, especially for struggling readers, or for language learners. That has been at the core of the LingQ system for years. LingQ, of course, offers other functions to help readers acquire language. I guess our ideas are now going mainstream.
Academic research supports the assertion that all readers can benefit from
listening while reading. In an influential 2007 study, “Learning through
Listening in the Digital World,” neuropsychologist David Rose and professor
Bridget Dalton drew upon cognitive educational research to report that “both
learning to listen and listening to learn are critical to literacy in the 21st
century as new technologies rebalance what it means to be literate and to
learn.” Professor David Dockterman commented on Rose’s and Dalton’s findings,
“For struggling readers, narration can provide decoding support, but there’s
an added benefit to well-narrated text that helps even competent readers.
Hearing something read with expression provides additional clues to the
meaning beyond the words themselves.”
I have been saying this for years. I have tried to interest basic literacy teachers in LingQ, with no luck. They want to “teach” people how to read, how to infer, higher level thinking, and other such “cognitive” skills rather than just letting them listen while they read, and enjoy whatever interests them. More information here.
3 Comments
Ok, <i>that</i> sounds awesome! As in, having huge potential for language learners. Very cool, thanks for sharing that, Steve. Now if we could just get more parallel texts available in e-book format (imagine that combined with having audio narration!)…"I have tried to interest basic literacy teachers in LingQ, with no luck. They want to "teach" people how to read, how to infer, higher level thinking, and other such "cognitive" skills rather than just letting them listen while they read, and enjoy whatever interests them."Really? Teachers are insisting on doing things the hard way (the harder it is, the better it must work!) instead of making things fun? Nooo! That never happens!
Cheers,Andrew
The new audio Kindle would make the deal for me – if they could get some Czech, Russian, Albanian, Arabic … books. It’s not as though the files don’t already exist, somewhere. (Mluvené slovo is what you’ll want to ask for in Prague). As for the current Kindle version, got an elementary Arabic reader to read in the computer-based Kindle program (for which audio files are available at the publisher’s site), but it was a waste of money – the Arabic text is tiny and can’t be enlarged (the English text can be, but that’s larger to start with). The margins are large, so there was plenty of room, but it looked like they just photocopied the Arabic and used it as an image. (The audio files were fine – the speaker has a pleasant voice and speaks at a reasonable rate.)As for convincing language teachers to use the LIngq method, at least as a supplement, why not arrange for some proof? Grad students are always looking for something to do a thesis on, so why not present the idea of a comparison of progress with and without Lingq? Since the method is computer-based, coming up with statistics shouldn’t be a big problem. The evaluation needn’t be restricted to measures of the number of words learned or amount of writing done voluntarily, but could/should include questions on how confident the student feels about his language skills, how committed he is to continuing his study of it , as so forth. It might get teachers’ attention if it turns out that students end up more interested in continuing their study of the language after they’ve found a way to read what they’re interested in.
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