February 27, 2025 - 1:30pm
The National Literacy Trust has sparked quite the controversy with its proposal that audiobooks be introduced into the school curriculum. The suggestion follows the finding that among children between the ages of eight and 18, increasing numbers report listening to audiobooks for pleasure even as the numbers who report reading for pleasure heads south. Is this, as some think, a sign that the barbarians are at the gates?
Here, we need to make an analytical distinction between two things. One is reading for literary pleasure and appreciation. The other is reading with a view to acquiring skill in the written language, or literacy. The two obviously feed into one another in a benevolent feedback loop. Skill in the second thing unlocks pleasure in the first; pleasure in the first thing is what will drive young readers to decode ever more sophisticated texts and find themselves learning, along the way, how to spell “syzygy” or use a semicolon.
But they are nonetheless different things. So when it comes to introducing audiobooks alongside the dead-tree sort into the curriculum, we should be firm: as well as, brilliant; instead of, madness.
Our personal encounters with literature are oral before they are written, given that listening to bedtime stories is where it all begins. The foundation stone for a lifetime of reading is being read to. And, of course, human encounters with literature were oral before they were written: at the fountainhead of all storytelling are the folktales, myths and legends whose archetypal patterns are to be found in even the most sophisticated literary novels of today.
More than that, the sound of language in literary texts — what in prose we call cadence — is arguably the most important part of what makes them beautiful. When we talk about “good writing”, we usually mean that it sounds right. That applies just as much when you read silently as when you read aloud. The bits of your brain associated with hearing light up, neurologists tell us, even when you aren’t moving your lips.
So why on earth should we be so short-sighted, so short-memoried, as to sneer at listening to texts rather than reading them? Homer, Shakespeare and Milton (though the latter, admittedly, didn’t have a choice) all composed for the ear rather than the eye. Teachers can incorporate audiobooks into the curriculum without “dumbing down” lessons. Pupils’ enjoyment and understanding of The Waste Land will be greatly enhanced by listening to Alec Guinness read it, for instance.
But written language matters, too. Unlike the rules of spoken English, which we pick up automatically just by wandering about in the world and owning ears, the rules of any written language are artificial conventions that must be painstakingly learned. Children will learn very little about how to spell and punctuate if their only encounter with books is through an Audible subscription. Being formally taught those things at school helps; but what reinforces this teaching is working through the countless millions of well-formed sentences that you will encounter if you read a lot of books. And, until AI renders human writing entirely redundant, the ability to compose and decode Standard Written English is one that puts you at a huge advantage in the world.
Here, the NLT is right to be optimistic. Being read to has always helped lead children to reading for themselves, not least because it assuages that thirst for storytelling which seems to be wired into the species. There’s no reason to suppose that the process doesn’t continue. Children’s love of stories has always jumped from platform to platform — the stage, the page, the radio, the screen, the playground, even video games — and these needn’t be considered to be in competition: more often, they are mutually reinforcing. Indeed, according to the NLT’s survey of 37,000 children, well over a third of pupils reported that enjoying audiobooks sparked an interest in reading.
Why wouldn’t it? If you take pleasure in, say, listening to Stephen Fry read Harry Potter in the car, you know that the books contain something worth having. And sooner or later, you are likely to notice that with a print book you can take in the good stuff much faster with your eyes than you can with your ears. This is, after all, the generation that watches YouTube at 1.5x speed so everyone sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks. They may be in a hurry now, but they’ll get there.
questingvole
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SubscribeThe ear rather than the eye? A highly arguable contention given the argument which the article proceeds to set forth whereby the ear and the eye are not in opposition.
Milton undoubtedly wrote for the eye, going to great trouble to have his works printed well. Paradise Lost, which I imagine the Mr Leith has in mind, was never meant to be sung. Milton was a famously mediocre writer for the stage-as-acted. Samson Agonsites doesn’t play well either.
Equally the very obscurity of reference and structure of some of Shakepeares Plays seem to imply that he expected a literate and erudite reader to have the text in hand at some point.
Homer? What can we know of Homer in his own world? It was long doubted that oral transmission of such lengthy works was even possible although since Alfred Lords’s The Singer of Tales the oral tradition has been rehabilitated somehwat in the context of the archaic world. There is no question however that Homer’s ancient reputation was translated by copyings and recopyings – not rehearsal.
Besides that we do know emphatically that his legacy and reception in the West is almost entirely down to his transmission via the written word.
Homer was entirely lost in the west for many centuries. None of his works survived until Petrarch chanced upon a written Greek text of Homer in 1354 carried by a Greek traveller. There began the Renaissance which continued more or less right up to the the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s.
Keats ‘Looked’ into Chapmans Homer, lest we forget, he did not hear it recited. Anyone who has enjoyed Chapman’s raucuous and venomous annotations to his own text will know they are a performance in their own right.
Audiobooks are for the old, the weak-eyed, and the lazy.
UK is going backwards. How many other non-English speaking countries have the concept ‘dumbing down’? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just us.
Literacy must be taught. Reading and writing. Then understanding, looking for information, memorising, summarising, responding. And finally criticising. Writing is itself a form of memorising.
Audiobooks will take children back to the days of the campfire. They will enjoy the experience but learn nothing and remember nothing.
It is quite extraordinary the direction of travel of the UK.
Lazy teachers will love audiobooks. Lazy children too.
I meet the first two of you three criteria but I agree, nevertheless.
British education has been dumbed down for decades and while I appreciate that story telling does have an oral tradition, I can say from experience that I have to listen to an audio book multiple times to be able to fully absorb he information. I don’t have the time to read many of the books I want to read and so have bought them in audio format to listen to while walking the dog and driving but my attention isn’t 100% on the content.
Schools fail to engage young people with reading because they insist on making them read boring books that fail to engage the reader. When I was a teenager, I wanted to read Terry Pratchett and Clive Barker etc, at school I had to read Kes which I thought was rubbish and it didn’t engage me in the slightest!
‘Kes’ ? You were lucky, my children had to put up with Benjamin Zephaniah’s poems, enough to put them off poetry for life.
With sincere respect to what was very likely a bit of humour on your part, it is the duty and the privilege of a parent to share the treaures of our nations songs and stories with our own children.
I don’t undersand people blaming schools for things like aversion to poetry. Tennyson, Blake and Milton have out in penny paperback for a long time,
I agree with your first paragraph, no need to worry about my children, I read nursery rhymes and read poetry to them throughout their childhood, they were familiar with John Clare, William Blake, ‘Hiawatha’, Walter de la Mere, Edward Lear, even Shakespeare – “the wind and the rain”, all sorts.
Your second paragraph though, unfortunately I think very few of their school friends had a similar background in poetry or any other literature, and while desirable it is quite unrealistic to expect so much literary input by parents generally. All that I gave my children could have been given to a classroom of children by a good English teacher, it was to me in the 1960s and 70s, but not to my children in the 1990s and 00s.
I think there is every reason to be highly critical of schools today in the UK failing to inspire children with a love of poetry and song. It really is not difficult.
Forget for the moment whether audio or written is better. Surely, an audiobook is an interpretation of that book, not simply the book itself. In between the listener and the writer there is a person who stresses certain words to enhance their meanings. So you bypass the book for an interpretation. If you go further and make a movie from a book, you have a director and several actors who are analysing that book and performing an interpretation – performing their ideas, not necessarily that of the author.
Also, there are books and there are books. Perhaps you start reading a story book for children and then, when your reading improves, you might try (like me) a lot of scientific papers. But you need the initial reading experience, the easy stuff, to build up your confidence for difficult things.
That’s another disadvantage. The monotony of the reader’s voice.
Reading fiction for young people is an active process. They will read their feelings and understanding into the book.
Listening to an audiobook reduces a child to a dumb receptacle. Probably thinking about anything but the book.
Listening to stories is much more cognitively demanding than reading them. No one should worry that a rise in listening means dumbing down is occurring. Reading is a weird, unnatural thing that has had a spectacular rise but will disappear again as tech makes it unnecessary. Listening is here for the foreseeable.
You do realise you’ve just put forward an argument against listening instead of reading for children ?
The point of reading is in order to understand the text fully, the easier it is to understand it the better.
It’s not an argument, it’s a statement of the facts.
I always have two books on my phone – one of which I read and the other I listen to. And the reason is that there are many things that require my time when it’s impossible to read; cooking, housework, ironing, driving, gardening, running, shopping, etc. Whatever it is on my phone that allows me to download books from my local library has 30 second replay and skip buttons and for the reading book a highlight button to consult a dictionary, an encyclopedia or a translator. The library currently has 6363 eBooks and 4005 audio books.