Read while you listen

Thirty-five Japanese university students each read three graded readers, books written for learners at a set level, and met 28 target words in them. In Brown, Waring and Donkaewbua (2008), each book was taken one of three ways: reading only, reading while listening to a recording, or listening only. The students were tested on the words' meanings straight afterward, a week later, and three months later.

Reading while listening won. It produced the largest vocabulary gains and held on to them best over the three months. Reading alone came second.

Listening alone came last. The gains were modest per book, a few words on the strictest test, which is what incidental learning looks like: small per story, and it adds up.

Webb and Chang (2015) ran the longer version. Taiwanese learners of English read ten graded readers with their audio over thirteen weeks. They learned a substantial share of the target words and still had most of the gain three months on, and the words that came back most often, spread across the books rather than bunched in one, were the ones learned best.

Why does the voice help? Neither study tested the mechanism, so this is my reading. The recording keeps your eye moving, so you do not stall on every unknown word.

It tells you where the words begin and end, which a page of a language you cannot yet hear does not. And it gives your memory two handles on each word, the look and the sound, instead of one.

This is the whole design of Aloglot, so I will be plain about it. It reads you the book while the words light up in time with the voice, so you are always reading while listening.

The English sits under every sentence and any word explains itself on a tap, which is what lets you keep going through the words that would otherwise stop you. Read enough books that way, and the words that keep coming back become yours.

Sources

• Brown, Waring and Donkaewbua (2008). Incidental vocabulary acquisition from reading, reading-while-listening, and listening to stories. Reading in a Foreign Language, 20(2), 136–163.
• Webb and Chang (2015). Second language vocabulary learning through extensive reading with audio support: How do frequency and distribution of occurrence affect learning? Language Teaching Research, 19(6), 667–686.