Dr. Arianna Dagnino, Sessional Lecturer of Italian, explores the possibility of using audiobooks in classrooms in this interview with voice actor Dennis Kleinman.
“Should we also envisage teaching literature using books in audiobook format, especially when working with languages other than English? Would this be an alternative way of engaging students? What would this entail? Would it be feasible, viable, advisable?”
I was prompted to ask myself these questions when, last year, I worked with South African voice actor Dennis Kleinman on the audiobook of my post-apartheid novel The Afrikaner (Guernica Editions), which was released in May on all major platforms.
I have asked Dennis to answer these questions together and help me discuss one of the fastest growing publishing sectors.
Audiobooks for the classroom
“Audiobooks might represent an alternative way of enjoying literature closer to the oral tradition.”
Arianna:
Oral tradition: To a certain extent, audiobooks bring us back to the times when people would sit around a fire to listen to a storyteller, or back to medieval times, when bards would travel from one village to the next to tell their stories of knights, dragons, quests, and crusades. By adding an aural element to the text under scrutiny, audiobooks might well be capable of enhancing a student’s experience of the classics as much as of contemporary works of world literature.
Second language learning: The audiobook rendition of a written text offers a supplementary and functional interpretation of the text by providing, among other things, a skillful use of pauses, differently accented voices (thus enriching the linguistic tapestry of the work), and the proper pronunciation of foreign words or of words never encountered before. Especially for students who are learning a language other than their mother tongue or who are not proficient or particularly well versed in the language of the text, these aural hints might prove particularly useful and vivid enough to spur on imagination.
Comprehension: From a cognitive point of view, reading books and listening to books go hand-in-hand. As the psychologist Daniel Willingham states in his book The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads, “What you find is very high correlations of reading comprehension and listening comprehension.” Reading well means you can also listen well and vice versa. After all, monks have been doing this for centuries: eating their meals in silence while attentively listening to one of their brothers reading from the Scriptures.
Multitasking: If a book is aptly read by an experienced voice actor, it can be extremely captivating. Especially in a time when the youth are used to multitasking and have problems of attention span, listening while walking, jogging, or preparing food could be a way to keep them focused despite the possible—perhaps inevitable—shortcomings of such a practice. Pros and cons of adopting audiobooks in the classroom at an academic level have been discussed in a recent article by Natalia Mikidenko and and Svetlana Storozheva, “Audiobooks: Reading Practices and Educational Technologies.”[i]
Dennis:
Supporting materials: Many educational and historical audiobooks are already accompanied with documents (usually in PDF format) that may include charts, graphs, maps, and photographs that are cross referenced in the audio materials pertaining to the subject matter of the book. In this regard, educators have the opportunity to devise all sorts of different tools to enrich and complement the students’ aural experience of a written text by adding supporting material in other formats.
E-learning: Adopting audiobooks in the classroom ties in with e-learning and audio-presented courses, which are used a lot in the corporate world and have become a very popular way for people in all walks of life and industries to gain more knowledge. To this purpose, textbooks in many subjects, as well as recountings of historical events, are increasingly being recorded in audiobook format, and this is certainly a growing sector of the industry.
The rapidly growing world of literature in audiobook format
“Audiobook publishing is one of the fastest growing sectors in digital publishing and continues to expand each year with a projected increase of at least 25% per year through 2025.”
Dennis:
There are many portals for audiobook production and distribution, the biggest being Audible. Audible owns ACX, a platform that provides authors an opportunity to connect directly with narrators and producers to bring their work to audio life. All work created through the ACX system is distributed to Audible, Amazon and iTunes. The other major portal is Findaway, which is a similar idea but has a larger distribution to smaller publishers, although it includes the leading players such as Audible.
Arianna:
Many people are discovering how many more books they can enjoy in a year if they can “listen to them” instead of “reading them”. This happens whether they are interested in sci-fi, thrillers, romance stories or in literary classics and heavy-weights such as Proust’s Swann’s Way, Leo Tolstoy’s War & Peace, or James Joyce’s Ulysses (recently released in a version read by Irish professional actors).
As the American writer and musician Art Edwards confesses, what he found when he discovered audiobooks “felt like story-time for adults”. Eventually, listening to a good audiobook version would often feel to him “more engaging, enriching—just plain better—than reading a book.”[ii] In particular, Edwards doesn’t deny the fact that he much more enjoyed the audiobook version than the paper version of Ulysses: “I felt like it had taught me more than reading the book ever could.”
Audiobook cover of The Afrikaner (2021) by Dr. Arianna Dagnino, read by Dennis Kleinman.
The more people discover the pleasure of listening to audiobooks—not only as time-saving devices for reading sessions that otherwise would be lost to their busy lives, but also as genuine artistic expressions in themselves—the more audiobooks are being produced and sold worldwide.
[i] Natalia Mikidenko and and Svetlana Storozheva, “Audiobooks: Reading Practices and Educational Technologies” (SHS Web of Conferences, Vol. 97, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/20219701016).
[ii] Art Edwards, “Listening to Literature—What We Gain and Lose with Audiobooks,” Quillette, 28 July 2021, https://quillette.com/2021/07/28/listening-to-literature-what-we-gain-and-lose-with-audiobooks
