April+5th+Article



Rubenstein, Grace. "Listening to Literature: Struggling Readers Respond to Recorded Books." //Edutopia//. The George Lucas Educational Foundation, 18 Oct. 2006. Web. 03 Apr. 2012. .

Abbie Root, a fifth-grade teacher at Brookside Elementary School, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, used recorded books to help her students read and improve their reading skills to get to grade level. At the beginning of the school year, only six of her twenty-seven students were reading at grade level. Using recorded books from Pacific Learning's New Heights program, Ms. Root had the students listen to the text on tape while following along on paper. She continued this and had them repeat the exercise until they could read each story on their own. This was a part of the normal reading lessons and used as a part of the typical school day, not as a special or separate activity.

The students used the audio books to expose themselves to text that was beyond their reading ability level. The audio books presented challenges to their vocabulary and comprehension. The class used the audio books to improve their reading, but also so they weren’t stuck with boring content. The goal of this, from Ms. Root’s point of view, is to give the students the chance to learn to love literature. The technology was used to introduce the students to new genres, increase critical listening, and highlight the humor in text. These audio books were a part of the reading lessons and were complimented by the physical text in front of them.

Because the goal of the efforts in using audio books in conjunction with physical, normal books was to improve the student’s reading skills and get them reading at appropriate grade level, assessments that measured reading level would have been used. These were probably semi-formal assessments, like standardized tests. The results of the tests (no matter what their form) were positive, because between November and April, the number of grade-level readers in Ms. Root's class doubled.