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Playaway News Story Highlights Education & Audio Literacy

Nice local news story about Playaway over the weekend [Saturday 14 November, 2009]. One of the most interesting points was Jeff Williams, K-12 literacy coach for the Solon, OH school district, noting that, for many students, listening to an audiobook while following along with the text can be, "a powerful tool for developing fluency, vocabulary, story sense, comprehension, etc."

This echoes ideas expressed by Mary Burkey and other educators about the usefulness of audiobooks in developing and enhancing language fluency.  (See my earlier post on Mary's ideas.)

Another interesting point by Williams:  audiobook listening "is a literate behavior that literate adults participate in routinely — listening to a text while driving or traveling or just to relax is something that millions of Americans do, so why would we forbid students from doing so?" 

Indeed, in a world with ever-increasing volumes of information and ever-increasing time pressure, audiobook listening is arguably a life skill for every student to be taught and encouraged.

What are your thoughts about audiobooks and literacy?  Click below to leave your comment.

P.S. The news story was accompanied by the above photo.  In it, young master Thomas Metz (age 6) is listening to The Great Fire, the story of the Chicago fire of 1871, by Jim Murphy.  A Newbery Honor title and a YALSA Best Book, it's produced by Audio Bookshelf.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Sr. Manager for Content Strategy

Urban Lit - is it a hit? (Putting the "playa" in Playaway)

Interesting story about "urban lit" on NPR's Morning Edition last week [Wed 10/14/2009]. If you missed the broadcast, you can listen online.

This is a genre we hear about periodically from big-city libraries, and we've done our best to provide some audio offerings on Playaway. To date, we offer the following titles, with more on the way:

Ride or Die Chick by J.M. Benjamin

K'wan Presents Bullet Proof Love by Sonny F. Black

Shyt List by Reign (launches on Playaway 12/1/2010 - please don't ask me how this one is pronounced)

Publisher-provided BISAC codes for the these titles list them as FIC048000: Urban Life, FIC049000: African American/General, and FIC049070: African American/Urban Life. 

What exactly is Urban Lit (sometimes also called Street Lit, Urban Fiction, or Black Pulp Fiction)?  As is often the case with genre designations, a precise meaning can be difficult to pin down.  Generally, the term refers to recent works depicting mostly African-American characters and most often set in a "Gangsta" world of street crime, drugs, money, guns, and violence.

But this kind of literature isn't necessarily so new. Nelson Algren (1909-1981), author of the 1949 National Book Award winner The Man With the Golden Arm, wrote tales of this sort beginning in the 1930's and 40's. He famously described himself as a chronicler of "drunks, pimps, prostitutes, freaks, drug addicts, prize fighters, corrupt politicians, and hoodlums." 

Incidentally, Man With the Golden Arm and Never Come Morning (1942) have both been produced in audio by Blackstone and are available on Playaway. (Never Come Morning launches on 1/1/2010.)

Is the new Urban Lit a deathless art form that will stand the test of centuries? Uhh... I'll get back to you on that.

Does it resonate with a certain demographic that might not otherwise be very inspired to read for pleasure? It looks like maybe it does. Certainly that's the thrust of the NPR story. Curious, I gave a listen to Ride or Die Chick by J.M. Benjamin.

Is it splendidly written? No, not really. Sometimes words are used incorrectly or ungrammatically, but that doesn't set it apart from too many other works of literature.  Narrator Hassan Johnson reads it with authenticity and brings the dialogue to life. 

Is it misogynistic? A glance at the bikini-clad woman on the cover might make you think that it would be, but in fact, there are some interesting takes on gender, sexuality, and identity. Treacherous Freeman, the hero, tells his female sidekick Teflon Jackson to "man up," when he fears she's going soft on him. But, when he contemplates the possibility of losing her, the love of his life and his "better half," he crys "gangsta tears" -- the kind that are only on the inside. Treacherous himself was cared for from infancy by a gun-toting single dad, for whom raising a child was "his biggest challenge as a man."

Does it glorify violence and criminal behavior? Yes, arguably it does.  But since when does that disqualify a book from being immensely popular? (The new R. Crumb illustrated edition of The Book of Genesis carries a tongue-in-check warning label advising: "Adult supervision recommended for minors.")

Is there profanity? Yes, of course, and plenty of it. But we've been used to that since Catcher in the Rye, right?

Explicit sex scenes?  Yah, you betcha -- very explicit.  This initially came as a shocker to me and some of my colleagues, until we compared it to the scenes in those Lisa Kleypas and Stephanie Laurens romances that respectable library patrons routinely gobble up.  And certainly it's nothing that readers of the recently deceased best-selling author E. Lynn Harris haven't encountered in his works (some of which are occasionally classified as Urban Lit).  Interestingly, the themes of monogamy, commitment, and true love keep coming up.

Also interesting is the fact that, although many aspects of life on the streets are rationalized ("others took the risks of making it, but Treacherous and Teflon took the risks of taking it"), the book's heroes assiduously avoid the drug scene.  And Treacherous, the tough, armed-to-the-teeth, motorcycle-riding gangsta hero/anti-hero is actually a reader -- one of several personality traits that set him apart from the hoods, hustlers, and players who populate the story.  He especially likes the works of Donald Goines (1937-1974) and Iceberg Slim (1918-1992), two pioneers of the Urban Lit genre.  (And by the way, he and Teflon do wear their motorcycle helmets.)

Does this tale of a "treacherous, free man" have "redeeming social importance" or is it just some people's idea of a good read? I'll let individual readers and listeners be the judge of that.

Can it promote literacy and a general interest in literature among reluctant readers of all ages? Maybe. What do you think?  Click on the "comments" link below and share your opinion. 

Mary Burkey on Audio Literacy

I've been bugging my friend Mary Burkey about whether anyone recorded her wonderful remarks on audio literacy during a panel discussion on "Multiple Literacies" at this summer's ALA annual meeting in Chicago. Unfortunately, no recording was made. (Mary's trusty digital recorder, which she often carries with her, was on loan to someone else who was capturing another session.)

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/