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Read with or without audio? | ||
Tags: Listening-Reading (L-R) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5376 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 1 of 11 12 June 2015 at 6:01pm | IP Logged |
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I've been reading old posts about reading and listening. I'm interested in the benefits/disadvantages of reading while listening to an audio book and comparing that to the benefits/disadvantages of just reading the same text without audio on a kindle.
At first, it seems to me that adding audio to the reading experience will help the learner with his or her "listening" skills. The learner will hear the word being said while they are seeing it in text. This seems good. However, some people have commented that the audio may be something of a "crutch" for the learner and hinder advancement. The learner cannot stop and "struggle" with an unknown word if listening to audio. The learner cannot easily look up unknown words if listening to audio. The learner does not learn as much vocabulary if listening to the audio at the same time. On the other hand, the audio forces the learner to press on and skip over unknown words and make a quick guess as to their meaning. It helps the learner better "understand" text/audio with some gaps for unknown words. I'm in a stage where I'm trying to do a lot of reading novels in Spanish. I have the audio books for many of the novels I own. I'm basically trying to decide if I should be just reading books on my kindle where I can easily look up unknown words or if I should "read" the books while listening to the audio. Does anyone have any thoughts on which is a better use of study time? Reading with or without audio? If you had a book you wanted to read and the audio book was available would you rather read it while listening to the audio or just read it on your kindle without audio? Edit: I should add that reading is important to me, but being able to understand spoken conversations is more important to me for the long term. Edited by James29 on 12 June 2015 at 6:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4522 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 2 of 11 12 June 2015 at 6:28pm | IP Logged |
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The few studies I know about that conclude that it's better to listen while reading
instead of just reading (both without looking anything up) and both are better than just listening. I'm talking purely about vocabulary acquisition here. I would assume that reading with a popup dictionary would trump them all (we have seen studies where this leads to better aquisition than just extensive reading - if I remember correctly). But on a more practical note, I don't see why I would need to read a text if I could just listen to it. Extensive listening can be done in situations you wouldn't be able to read. And then I can limit my reading to books I don't have audio for - and use a popup dictionary to aid vocabulary acquisition. I am generally in favour of splitting those two into separate activities. The exception is when your listening comprehension is so poor that you can't even understand high-quality audiobooks. Edited by daegga on 12 June 2015 at 6:30pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| chaotic_thought Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 3543 days ago 129 posts - 274 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, French | Message 3 of 11 12 June 2015 at 7:33pm | IP Logged |
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Notice the word "reading" in this sense can refer to two distinct activities:
Reading #1. Look at some marks on a page and convert these to a comprehensible output stream using your voice, which could in principle be understood by an audience. Reading #2. Look at some marks on a page and convert these into thoughts, thoughts which need only be understood by the reader. Notice that the two processes are intertwined. It's not really possible to perform activity #1 without at least doing part of #2. This is why, for example, computerized TTS systems sound so "lifeless". Since they don't actually "understand" the text that they're synthesizing, they don't add any of the unconscious signals that we humans do whenever we deliver our production of a text. Anyway, the clear advantage of performing activity #2 is speed. If you just want to understand a text, you can get through much more of it without worrying about how it sounds. This is almost certainly what you do when you read texts for pleasure or for academic purposes in your native language. As for listening/reading used for building proficiency in a target language, the three versions I have used are as follows. In each case the first sentence (in bold) is the activity that you are actively practicing. Drill 1. Listen to an audio version of a text performed in your target language. While you are listening to this, read (#2) a translation of this text which is written in your teaching language. The teaching language can be any language that you can understand better than your target language. Drill 2. Listen to an audio version of a text performed in your target language. While you are listening to this, read (#2) a transcription of this text which is written in your target language. Drill 3. Read (#2) a text which is written in your target language. As you are reading the text, passively listen to an audio version of this text which has been translated into your teaching language. In drill #3, you are training your "reading" (#2) ability in the target language, i.e. you don't care at all about how it sounds, you just want to understand it quickly by sight. This is bascially the same as studying using a parallel text, except that you don't have to bother looking back and forth at two different texts. For learning languages I prefer drill #1 followed by drill #2 for a text. You probably want to introduce a delay between drill #1 and drill #2 -- otherwise you will feel bored because you feel like "Hey, I just read this yesterday!". If you give it a month or two, you can re-read the text (like Harry Potter or whatever) and still potentially get some entertainment value out of it. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5263 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 4 of 11 12 June 2015 at 9:42pm | IP Logged |
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At your stage, James, I don't think (in my personal opinion) that listening and reading in Spanish would be that useful to you. They are two different skills at this point in your learning. You already know how to listen and you already know how to read well enough. I've tried it and don't find it all that useful to me at my level in Spanish and Portuguese. I do find it useful in Haitian Creole which is at a lower level.
I find listening to the audio either slows me down in my reading or may impede me if I come up on an unknown idiom or a word or two that I'd like to know. So at the C1 levels (self evaluated, native-speaker feedback and online tests for me) I either listen to a book or read it, but I don't do both at the same time in Portuguese and Spanish. I train my listening and reading separately from each other. So, I think you could possibly gain some benefit from it, but I think those benefits would be minor. I think you will gain more, and your time would be better spent, by continuing your listening, branching out to challenging yourself more in your reading (by getting away from translated novels and into authentic Spanish language literature) and starting a telenovela. Even if a telenovela is 40 minutes online or a DVD, you could split it in half at the natural break and pick up the second half the next day- with no loss in continuity. A telenovela will do wonders for your colloquial Spanish. Don't fall into the trap of "I already have X resource, therefore; I should use it". Edited by iguanamon on 13 June 2015 at 12:21am 7 persons have voted this message useful | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7206 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 5 of 11 12 June 2015 at 11:12pm | IP Logged |
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As far as advice, I think iguanamon knows what you need to do.
Some books are good enough to go through multiple times. I've found it helpful to vary my approaches. I often do this in simultaneous waves, but I'm starting to think sequential waves are better. These can all be mixed and matched, depending on interest and how difficult the material is. Listen only (when your not in a position to read). Listen and Read together. I've used these three combinations, but mostly the first and last. 1) Listen/Read TL/NL (target language/native language). 2) Listen/Read NL/TL. Profressor Arguelles likes this for improving reading comprehension. 3) Listen/Read TL/TL If you understand everything, this is the graduate level. Read only. I've found this helpful because it takes away the listening crutch. It also gives me a chance to think and analyze a bit more. As a general rule, if I can listen and read at the same time, that's what I do. I usually only just read when there is too much background noise to listen safely, or if I want to slow down and mine some vocabulary or test myself that I can get by without audio. I'm a listen learner. Do you hear what I'm saying? :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 6 of 11 12 June 2015 at 11:36pm | IP Logged |
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Reminds me on this (controversial) thread. It might not be the easiest to listen to Spanish and look up the unfamiliar words, but it's much more challenging than just reading, and I'm sure you'll also hear many words that you've only seen in writing so far.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sarnek Diglot Senior Member Italy Joined 4216 days ago 308 posts - 414 votes Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: German, Swedish | Message 7 of 11 13 June 2015 at 8:53am | IP Logged |
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@daegga
Are these studies available on internet and do you still have a link to them? Edited by Sarnek on 13 June 2015 at 8:55am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4522 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 8 of 11 13 June 2015 at 12:58pm | IP Logged |
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I haven't saved (all) the links, most of the stuff has been posted on this forum already,
but here some examples: on reading gains on listening gains on dictionary usage You can find the free PDF for the listening paper via google scholar, but the link is too long to properly link it here (damn you forum) Edited by daegga on 13 June 2015 at 1:00pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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