- By Shoaib Khan 13-Jan-2023
- 420
Listening to a book and reading it both have their own benefits and drawbacks. Listening to a book can be convenient for people who are on the go or have difficulty reading, and it can also be a way to experience different narrators and interpretations of the material. However, some people find that reading a book allows for greater focus and retention of the material. Ultimately, whether listening to a book is as good as reading it will depend on the individual and their preferences.
A few years ago, when people heard I was a reading researcher, they might ask about their child’s dyslexia or how to get their teenager to read more. But today the question I get most often is, “Is it cheating if I listen to an audiobook for my book club?”
Audiobook sales have doubled in the last five years while print and e-book sales are flat. These trends might lead us to fear that audiobooks will do to reading what keyboarding has done to handwriting — rendered it a skill that seems quaint and whose value is open to debate. But examining how we read and how we listen shows that each is best suited to different purposes, and neither is superior.
In fact, they overlap considerably. Consider why audiobooks are a good workaround for people with dyslexia: They allow listeners to get the meaning while skirting the work of decoding, that is, the translation of print on the page to words in the mind. Although decoding is serious work for beginning readers, it’s automatic by high school, and no more effortful or error-prone than listening. Once you’ve identified the words (whether by listening or reading), the same mental process comprehends the sentences and paragraphs they form.
Should teachers ever assign audiobooks instead of books for reading? Do you think you would perform better on a test if you had to listen to a book rather than read it?
