Audiobooks let language learners read and listen to the same text at once, and the effects of that on comprehension have been inconsistent. So the conditions under which audiobooks help are not well understood. Reading speed and are the obvious candidates for what decides it.
It helps against listening, not against reading. Forty-six English learners at an American university comprehended better when reading while listening than when listening only, and neither nor text complexity changed the size of that gain. Set against reading only, the audio added nothing measurable at all.
Audiobooks allow language learners to read and listen to the same text simultaneously. The effects of this bimodal input on learners’ comprehension have been inconsistent, which suggests that the conditions under which audiobooks can help comprehension are not well understood.
The author explored two candidate moderators: silent reading speed and text complexity. Both are plausible, since a slower reader might lean on the audio more, and a harder passage might need the extra channel most.
The design puts all three conditions inside each participant. Forty-six English learners in an American university read, listened to, and simultaneously read and listened to two complexity versions of a fictional text, with mixed-effects regression modeling applied to the results.
Participants comprehended better in the reading-while-listening conditions than in the listening-only conditions, echoing findings from the captions literature, and this effect was moderated by neither reading speed nor text complexity. There were also between reading while listening and reading only, which indicates limitations in the use of audiobooks to promote written text comprehension.
wat. Adding the page to the audio helped; adding the audio to the page did not.
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It tells a language teacher what an audiobook is actually for, and what it cannot replace.
How do we know?
Hui used a within-participant design in which each learner read, listened to, and simultaneously read and listened to two complexity versions of a fictional text, analyzed with mixed-effects regression modeling.
What is still unknown
Forty-six learners, one fictional text in two versions, and comprehension measured straight after.
Learn something?
Where to next
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