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How are you Using Audio-books in 2nd Language


elmerRex
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How do you help your child to benefit from audio-books in the 2nd language? My children struggle to listen to audio-books in the 2nd language, the readers go at a native rate and it is not easy enough for them to enjoy it.

 

Is there a strategem for using audio-books to help the kids to enjoy the story in a language that is not their native language?

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If you get audiobook from audible, you can slow down the speed of the books within the app.  If you run them through iTunes, and they are classified as audiobooks, I think there is also a way to slow them down.  

 

Otherwise, the only thing I can think of is to pick short picture books, and listen to them over and over.  

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I think this is a non-issue for bilingual students but for language learners, yes,  listen over and over with the accompanying book, I imagine.  If you are not a fluent speaker, can you find someone who is to read them the books or record the books for them at a slower pace?

 

Or maybe stick to videos where they will have visual clues that aid in comprehension until they become more fluent? 

 

How old are your children? What is your target language?

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  • 2 weeks later...

I think audiobooks require a high degree of language fluency to be fun.

We listened a lot to audiobooks in both our family language and the environmental language, but our kids basically grew up with both languages and acquired them like two native languages (we moved away from home when the kids were 3 and 1; DD was already fluent in the family language, DS learned both in parallel).

So, for truly bilingual families, audiobooks are fantastic. We usually listened in the car as a family and made the audiobooks a shared experience and talked about them.

For actual foreign languages studied like a foreign language, it would take many years before pure audiobooks are an enrichment and not a chore. (I remember my first English language movie after studying English for eight years... I barely understood anything.)

I would recommend reading along in the book; it is much easier if you can see the words along with hearing the sound. I prefer to watch foreign language films with subtitles in that language and understand a lot more that way.

Edited by regentrude
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  • 3 weeks later...

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