Technology in Education: Benefits of Audiobooks for Children

As technology has developed in recent years, audiobooks have become more popular and widely available. As such, children have increasingly used audiobooks and technology in order to read as opposed to printed books. This carries a number of advantages and disadvantages, highlighted by the large volume of ongoing research into the topic of the use of technology in education.

It has long been known that it is highly beneficial for children to have someone to read aloud to them. Parents are often encouraged to read to their children, as it carries the benefits of both bonding and increasing their child’s reading abilities. It makes sense, then, that audiobooks would be of great use to the development of reading skills in children. Renee Michelet Casbergue and Karen Harris highlight how it provides more choice for teachers: ‘That is, audiobooks can be employed interchangeably with print volumes, substituting or supplementing as a matter of individual preference or convenience.’ This is also the case for more interactive forms of reading, such as apps with visual accompaniments. Children are often interested in cartoons and animated media, so audiobooks and similar media provide a means by which children who usually do not show an interest in reading, can be encouraged to do so.

The National Literacy Report found that the use of audiobooks is advantageous, and that teachers agree with this. They found that the use of audiobooks is particularly useful in children who do not enjoy reading, and have lower literacy standards. They state that ‘Children and young people aged 9 to 18 with the lowest levels of reading confidence are more likely to read a variety of materials on screen than those with average or high reading confidence. For example, 23.3% of those who have low reading confidence read fiction on screen compared with 15% of their peers who have high reading confidence.’ This demonstrates that audiobooks can be highly effective in aiding the reading of children with low confidence by using materials that are more familiar to them. However, the fact that they are used less by confident readers suggests that they are not necessarily a better form of reading, but rather that they are useful in making reading inaccessible to children who are not comfortable reading printed books.

One issue that arises with the use of audiobooks is the voice which reads them. Different accents are used for different characters, which could potentially cause children to associate certain accents with certain types of people, and as such characterise particular accents as bad or good. Julia R. Dobrow and Calvin L. Gidney address the way this issue arises in cartoons in ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Foreign: The Use of Dialect in Children's Animated Television’. They concluded that ‘Results indicated that children’s animated programming continues to underrepresent people of colour and women. Linguistically, gender and ethnicity were marked by use of dialect stereotypes. Notably, villains consistently used non-American accents.’ This carries obvious issues, such as the fact that villains having non-American accents would likely make children attach negative connotations to non-American people. Although this was a cartoon rather than an audiobook, the same patterns are likely to arise, as different, distinct voices and accents are used so that children can differentiate between who is speaking.

Lotta C. Larson makes the interesting point that audiobooks allow students to tackle difficult words more effectively. Following her study she found that ‘the combined readinglistening experiences allowed them to adjust their reading rate and tackle unfamiliar or difficult-to-read words enabling them to read more and for longer period of time.’ This is a significant benefit that would apply to all children, increasing their interest and even lengthening the time they read for, which would allow for more development over the same long-term period.

Overall, audiobooks offer numerous advantages to children’s reading and comprehension. However, they do carry some issues and should not be viewed as a replacement for printed books.