From memory then, here are some of the points I recall her making from her perspective as an educator and a fan of audiobooks:
* Listening is not cheating -- it's an alternate way to experience a literary work.
* Audiobook listening expands listening skills. For most of human history, people lived in a "culture of orality". Storytelling, oral communication, and listening are central to our makeup as human beings. But not everyone is equally good at listening -- in fact, for some students it's really difficult. Like all skills, it requires practice.
* Audiobook listening increases language fluency for both struggling and proficient readers. The listener hears language as it is actually spoken, and, in the process, is exposed to correct pronunciation, new vocabulary, and new forms of speech. When you listen, you hear punctuation and enunciation being modeled. A great way to learn about the fluidity of written language is to listen to it.
* Audiobook listening can raise reading comprehension. Students can usually comprehend about 2 years beyond their reading level. English-language learners often hear and comprehend better than they can speak. By allowing struggling readers an alternate path into a book, an audiobook can help them take in its meaning. Listening gives struggling readers or readers of challenging material a helping hand, "carrying them across" the spots where they might stumble with the printed page (think of the many German phrases in The Book Thief).
* Gifted readers often devour books, but they don't necessarily remember the details. Some gifted kids like to listen to audio as a way to make themselves slow down and take in the details of what they gulped in print. ("Gulpers" don't necessarily learn to pronounce the words they read.)
* When we share literature with kids, what do we do? We read to them. Often the works that are read to students are filtered through the voices of their predominantly female teachers. One way to get boys more engaged with the listening/reading experience is to give them characters that sound the way they were written to be -- voiced by professional narrators and even full casts.
* Listening can help build attention spans -- audiobooks teach "long-form listening in a snippet world."
Mary tells me that she made some of these same points during her remarks at yet another session in which she participated in Chicago, this one on "Evaluating Audiobooks for Children and Teens". She did record the audio for that session, and it can be found, along with the session PowerPoint, on her Audiobooker blog at:
http://audiobooker.booklistonline.com/2009/07/20/evaluating-audiobooks-on-audio/
