Learning Ally Blog: Access and Achievement

Audiobooks, like Learning Ally's, are used in classrooms across the world to help students with visual impairments or learning disabilities such as dyslexia access grade-level content. Now, however, experts are realizing the power of audiobooks to help students who struggle with many different issues and aspects of reading, including vocabulary, comprehension, and even fluency. Here are five unique ways you can use audiobooks in the classroom to help these readers.

1. Give students a listening challenge, such as "How often does the main character change his mind?" or "Discover 3 places fossils are found." They can answer on a clipboard or via speech-to-text software.
2. Set up novel student groups, so students of all abilities can listen/discuss the same novel.  Audio-supported readers listen with headphones while traditional readers read in books. Then, break into small groups for in-depth discussion.
3. Create a listening station with art supplies, small toys or other objects to encourage students to draw/act out what they are hearing. Bringing in kinesthetic play can reinforce comprehension.
4. Compare narrators, read a passage aloud, and then have students listen to the same passage in an audiobook format. Compare and contrast the differences - which part was emphasized more? Did the way it was read help you understand the story from a different angle? Were all of the names pronounced the same by both narrators?
5. Write to one another. While studying the same story either through audio format or traditional reading, ask students to write or illustrate responses to the passages. Later, have students share their work with others. Did they discover something the other student missed? Did they both have the same feelings about the characters?

  Comment below with some creative ways you are using audiobooks in your classroom! We'd love to hear from you.    To find out more about Learning Ally, log onto LearningAlly.org/Educators. We have Quick Start packages available now to get your students started with our library of over 80,000 human-narrated audiobooks.