Why Audiobooks Benefit  Elementary and
Middle-School Readers

Audiobooks...

 • Increase language skills and literacy.
Audiobooks allow kids to hear language – an activity essential for building vocabulary, stimulating imagination, increasing reading fluency and providing models of pronunciation, sentence structure and grammatical accuracy.

 • Enhance reading level and comprehension.
Audiobooks help readers differentiate between the written and spoken word (example: buff-et and buffet) and provide a link between the two. When kids discover the bridge between text and speech, the world of reading opens for many. This process continues well into the middle school years.

 • Help foster a lifelong love of reading.
The increased language skills gained from listening to audiobooks make reading books more accessible and appealing to kids. Reading becomes a source of pleasure, entertainment and knowledge.

 • Help the struggling reader by providing a multi-sensory reading experience.
For students that find reading books frustrating, or who are not fluent in English, audiobooks provide a multi-sensory reading experience, which allow them to better decode the written word.

 * Source: audiobookshelf.com and listeninglibrary.com