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Learning English can be a challenge, no matter your level of proficiency. If you’re a beginner, although learning new words and making progress is fast, you’ll probably still find it difficult to express yourself in the language. If you’re at an intermediate level, you might become stuck in the middle; progressing slower than you once did, but still not feeling too confident in using the language. Even if you’re at advanced level, it can be tricky to take those final steps to full fluency.
Fortunately, there’s an often-overlooked tool that you can use to learn English faster, more effectively, and more enjoyably, at any level — audio book stories!
As we’ll see in this guide, by using audio book stories via a smart technique, you can quickly and effectively improve your apprehension of the English language, not only in reading and listening, but also in writing, and even speaking! And, to top things off, good audio stories are themselves a source of interest, providing an engaging way to learn and to help keep yourself motivated.
In this article, we’ll show you how to use audiobooks to teach yourself English by yourself, or using a learning platform like AcquiSpeak. Let’s get started:
Why Audio Books Are Beneficial For Learning
Language skills are commonly broken up into four parts: reading and listening (known as the ‘passive skills’) and speaking and writing (the ‘active skills’).
When it comes to learning English with audio book stories, it might be tempting to think that you’ll only be strengthening your passive skills: listening and reading. After all, the very name “audio” and “book” doesn’t imply much else. However, while it’s true that you’ll most certainly improve your listening and reading skills using audio book stories, when using them to their fullest, you’ll be able to improve so much more than just these.
Let’s start go through these skills one by one, and understanding how you can improve each using audio book stories:
Listening With Audio Book Stories
Let’s start with probably the most obvious skill relating to audio book language learning: listening. As soon as you start listening to an English audio book, you’ll be learning from the get-go. Frequent listening will help you to understand and internalise the following:
- Pronunciation: The way in which English words are spoken.
- Cadence: Customary changes in the pitch of one’s voice.
- Speed: The various rates of speech (and what they mean).
- Metre: The basic rhythm (specific to poetry).
In other words, by listening to an audio book story, you’ll get a better idea of how words sound, how to differentiate between the end of one word and the start of another, how English speakers use tone to indicate questions, commands, jokes, subtle emotions, and many other interpersonal skills.
Reading With Audio Book Stories
Another obvious one is reading. When you’re learning English (or any language) with audio books, you’ll not only have access to an audio version, but you’ll usually have access to the written text or book transcript too (more on this later).
When you read along to an associated audio, you’ll be strengthening multiple language skills simultaneously. For example, it should come as little surprise that by reading English, you’ll be able to improve your retention of new words, phrases, and vocabulary. However, it doesn’t stop there. Reading also strengthens your your retention of information more generally, as well as your focus, memory, and communication skills.
Let’s assume you’re frequently reading English texts at a beginner level. Over time, you’ll effortlessly be able to tell the difference between the subtle function of words that are used in multiple ways, such as the prepositions of, with, and to. What’s more, you’ll infer these differences naturally, meaning you won’t have to pick up a textbook at all!
Writing With Audio Book Stories
Writing skills aren’t normally associated with audio book learning. However, as we’ll see, that’s just a question of technique! In brief, we recommend using audio stories to sharpen your writing skills by listening to a sentence (without reading it) and pausing the audio recording as soon as you’ve heard as much as you can remember. Then, you can progress by repeating the sentence aloud to make sure you’ve memorized it and typing or writing it out in full (taking note of proper punctuation and spelling).
Once you’ve written the sentence, double check it’s correct by looking at the text.
You can do this line-by-line and work through a page this way, or use a guided learning platform like AcquiSpeak to give you input sentences to write out one by one (combined with helpful learning tools, exercises, and original stories and texts).
Speaking With Audio Book Stories
Like writing, speaking isn’t normally a skill associated with audio book learning. However, that doesn’t mean it cannot be learned this way too!
Using a specialized technique called ‘shadowing’, you can repeat aloud what you’re listening to in real time, paying attention to reproducing the native pronunciation as closely as you can. If the speed of the recording is too fast, consider slowing it down. Learn more about this technique in our guide on how to shadow effectively.
While this technique cannot be used alone to learn English, shadowing is a good addition to the other techniques in this method and provides an incredibly effective way of building, improving, and fine-tuning your pronunciation in English.
Limitations of Audio Book Stories
Audio book stories are an excellent way to learn English. In fact, based on our own research and experience, they are the best self-study method of all for learning English (and foreign languages in general).
However, although highly effective, audio book stories do have one major limitation. Language is, fundamentally, a means of communicating with other people. And, as a self-study technique, audio book learning doesn’t involve talking to other people.
That’s why we recommend combining the learning technique with general exposure to the English language, particularly speaking directly to native speakers.
How to Learn English With Audio Book Stories
Now that we’ve seen how audio book learning can improve your English skills in different ways, let’s look at the nitty-gritty of the method we already touched on to see how you can start learning English with audio book stories in the first place.
All told, the method involves several steps. Let’s go through them one by one:
Step 1 – Find a Story You Like
First, you’ll want to find a story, text, or book that’s at your level and that you know you’ll enjoy reading. This can be a tricky task.
First, consider your level. If you’re a beginner, you probably don’t want to be picking up an audio book of Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities. Instead, we recommend children’s stories, especially those by Roald Dahl such as Fantastic Mr Fox or James and the Giant Peach. These stories are a fun and easy introduction to English. If you’re at an intermediate level, then Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea is a great classic that’s probably more suitable for your level. On the other hand, if you’re an advanced learner of English, there are plenty of news publications you can listen along while reading an article, such as The Atlantic from the U.S. and The Guardian from the U.K.
Step 2 – Find an Audio Component
Once you’ve found a book or text that you’re ready to start reading, you’ll need to find a matching audio component. This can be tricky, but a good first place to start is YouTube. Simply type the name of your book or text into the search bar and, if you’re lucky, there’ll be a complete, high-quality recording for you to listen along to.
To be absolutely sure that you’ll get a professional audio for your book, we recommend subscribing to an audio book platform like Audiobooks.com, which offers thousands of English audio books in every genre.
Step 3 – Read Along
Here’s where the magic really begins:
Once you’ve got a written text and a matching audio recording, start playing the recording and reading along at the speed of the recording. Pay attention to the sounds and how they match onto the words you’re reading. This is the most important thing at this stage. (Indeed, you should try to understand the text as fully as you can. However, if you don’t know a word or a sentence, that’s okay. Don’t stop the recording; just continue reading along to the recording and infer the meaning as best as you can. Only if you don’t understand much at all should you consider an easier text.)
Stop the recording once you’ve completed a digestible section of text. What counts as a ‘digestible section’ is up to you. Generally, we recommend stopping after one or two pages if the print is small, or three or four pages if the print is large. This way, you’ll have a section of text that’s long enough to learn from, but short enough to digest.
To maximise your learning, we recommend listening in a quiet environment using a pair of headphones or earphones. That way, you’ll be able to focus on the audio and catch all the small nuance without being distracted.
Step 4 – Shadow
Next, you’ll start using your own voice by ‘shadowing’ the same text.
As we saw above, shadowing is a technique in which you repeat aloud what you hear as closely as possible, as quickly as possible after you hear it. To shadow your text, replay the recording of the section you’re working on. As soon as the voice begins, try to repeat it without any delay and without pausing the recording, all the while trying to produce the same pronunciation and intonation you just heard.
If you miss a word or two, simply skip them and move on. If the recording is too fast and you cannot keep up, then consider slowing it down (this is possible on most audio platforms and media players).
If shadowing is too intensive for you, you can also consider listening to a sentence, pausing the recording, and then repeating it aloud as closely as possible to the reader’s pronunciation. This will give you the same result, only with a less intensive means.
Step 5 – Analyse
By now, having seen the text twice, you’ll probably have a good idea of how the text sounds and its general meaning. However, you might be confused by some of the details. If so, then be encouraged, because you’ve picked a good text that’s neither too easy nor too hard!
To iron out the creases in your understanding, analyse the text.
To do this, you’ll need to go through it line by line. Pay attention to the grammar and consider why each sentence is constructed the way it is. Just as importantly, pay attention to the vocabulary. Upon closer inspection, you should be able to infer the meaning of the text. However, if there are words you simply don’t know, then look them up in a dictionary, or on Wiktionary.
The point of this step is to understand the text as deeply and thoroughly as possible. As yourself: Did I understand the meaning of every word in the text? Did I know what the grammar in the text was telling me? As soon as the answers to these questions is ‘yes’ and you feel like you know everything about the text, you’re ready to move on.
Step 6 – Recite the Text By Yourself (Optional)
For good measure, we recommend re-reading the text aloud one final time, this time without the audio recording. Listen to yourself speak and consider the correct pronunciation of the words.
Following this step will help you get a better idea of how your pronunciation sounds and which words you’re still having trouble with. However, if you’re feeling very confident with the text, consider skipping this step altogether.
Step 7 – Transcribe the Text (Optional)
Now that you’ve used your audio book story to practise your reading, listening, and speaking in English, this final step will help you to train the remaining skill too: writing.
Re-listen to the recording once again. This time, make sure you do not have the text in front of you (you need only the audio recording for this step). Hold as long a piece of the recording in your memory as you can (this is usually only a few seconds’ or a sentence’s worth), and then pause the recording. Write down the sentence; either by hand or by typing it on your computer. Then, look back at the text to check whether or not you wrote the sentence correctly, paying attention to spelling and punctuation.
Continue like this until you’ve written several paragraphs of text. (Don’t worry, you don’t need to transcribe the entire book! Only a few paragraphs at a time will be useful enough to practise.)