(The Hechinger Report) Despite the claims of those who propose to “disrupt” education with video lessons and a well-intentioned emphasis on STEM, reading remains the backbone of a real education. Unlike other species, humans use language as a kind of…
(Star Tribune) As a reader of a certain age, I have begun to take an actuarial view of my bookshelves. How many of these books am I really going to read before my own final chapter? With more and more…
(Pew Research Center) Americans are spreading their book consumption across several formats, and the use of audiobooks is rising. About three-quarters (74%) of Americans have read a book in the past 12 months in any format, a figure that has…
I've been asked this question a lot and I hate it. I’ll describe why in a bit, but for now I’ll just change it to “does your mind do more or less the same thing when you listening to an…
(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…