(Mind/Shift) Educators and parents are obsessed with reading; and the emphasis has only grown in recent decades as reading became a defining indicator of academic success on standardized tests. Yet despite the obsession with teaching reading in the early grades,…
(New York Magazine) As is required of all women in their 30s, I am in a book club. At the first meeting of this group, one poor unsuspecting woman mentioned that she had listened to that month’s selection instead of…
(The Edvocate) Every few months a story appears about the declining speech and language skills of children arriving in primary school. The epithet “the daily grunt” was invented by one newspaper to capture the lack of communication between parent and…
This study investigates the effects of audiobooks on listening comprehension skills of EFL Students, and their attitudes towards using audiobooks in a foreign language classroom. The participants are 66 first-year students of a state university in Turkey. The research follows…
(ABC Australia) Parents should be actively talking to their children as well as reading to them if they want to boost their literacy skills, a study from Macquarie University has found. Researchers from the Centre of Excellence in Cognition and…
(Mind/Shift) Nina Kraus, a biologist at Northwestern University, has spent the better part of her professional career researching how sound affects the brain. What she’s found has important implications for how adults and children manage the sounds that envelop them.…
(WBUR) Books in your ears. The history of audiobooks from wax cylinders to the digital age. We’ll trace the untold story of the talking book. The digital age has done a number on the music, movie and publishing industries. But…
(USA Today) Call it easy listening. Audiobooks are finding a new audience, as listeners discover the ease and portability of downloading recorded versions of books onto their smartphones. Once known as books on tape (and before that, books on vinyl),…