Audiobooks for Children:
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Note from Steve: I received this response from someone who disagreed with my opinion of audiobooks for children. I thought her opinion was well worth sharing.
I read your article about audiobooks for children. Sorry, but I disagree.
Yes, parents should find time to read to their kids. Yes, children should read themselves. But there is nothing wrong with audiobooks.
English is not my native language, but I did both: read and listened (a lot!) to books on tapes, and it helped me just to survive. I taught my youngest son to read when he was around 3.5 (both in English and in his native tongue), and he listens to many audiobooks.
He does both: reads the book and listens to it. It helped him to increase his vocabulary. And he is top of his class in English in his private school, where everybody else's native language is English. He still speaks his native language at home.
I agree with you about special effects, and prefer unabridged versions of books (so whenever a kid does not understand the word he can always look it up in the dictionary, or ask the parent). Children have different memory and they can tell you a story they listened to almost word for word. And it helps them in their own writing.
It is like playing piano: you can play it, but you can still enjoy listenening to other musicians creating their own version and style. And whenever my son reads aloud, he uses different voices for the characters (for every book, even if he did not listen to it). Storytelling has a long history, much longer than the written word.
And unlike TV with its fast pace, it lets kids to use their own imagination. And parents do not have to buy all expensive audiobooks, they can either rent/download them from the library, or use Librivox audiobooks. One more thing: unless we are flying somewhere, I do not allow my son to use earphones (I don't think it is a healthy habit).
Yours sincerely,
Natalia
The Reader's Toolbox pages.
Best Children's Books home page.
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