Using audio books to learn/teach English

Image by hiro.qli

We all know that the more exposure a person gets to the language they are trying to learn, the faster they will learn it, and the more vocabulary they will acquire.

Many of you are probably aware of the many graded audio books published by different ELT publishers, like Penguin, Macmillan, OUP, etc., and have used them in your classes, or as out-of-class assignments to help your students develop their reading and/or listening skills.

Browsing the web, I came across a very interesting resource: www.librivox.org. This is a digital library of volunteer audio recordings of books that are in the public domain. Their Wikipedia page states that it is probably the most prolific audiobook publisher since 2007. Their goal is “to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet.” Here you can find all kinds of classic books that would be an excellent resource in your elementary or middle school classes. Titles include: Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Aesop’s Fables, and many more.

The site is a bit hard to navigate, but, luckily, there are other services that offer librivox's audiobooks in a more user-friendly catalog. One of these sites is www.booksshouldbefree.com. Be sure to check it out and download as many audiobooks as you think your students, your children, or you, yourselves, will love to hear!

Posted in: