Audio books are bright tools to improve your English and motivate yourself as a language learner. One shouldn’t forget the fact that listening comprehension is one of the most important parts of acquiring a language, so it is advisable to convince yourself to improve it even if you have problems with it. Why do I consider using audio books as a very useful method in language learning?
- You can listen to them basically anywhere and anytime-during traveling, at home as if you were listening to your favourite tracks.
- They provide you a great opportunity to immerse into the language completely and to improve your listening skills with authentic English.
- You can get started with stories that you might have already read, so you get a bigger chance of understanding them and gaining a bit of success which is a key factor in learning a language.
As it is rather a free time activity than a professional learning method, so I can only give you some tips about how to improve your language skills up till some point.
- On the first occasion choose a book that you like, know or are very interested in. This way you won’t loose interest even if you don’t have a full understanding of the text itself.
- If you have the chance, try to re-listen over and over everything that you couldn’t get for the first time until you've managed to understand the listening script completely.
The original book is good to have at hand in case you’re completely stuck.
- Do write down the new words and expressions or at least the ones that you find useful or entertaining!
- If you’re tired to do all of these things, lean back and just enjoy the words, language and the story itself concentrating on the pronunciation and the intonation of English!
Although listening to audio books won’t prepare you for the situations in which you have to talk to a non-native speaker of English who tend to have various accents that can cause quite serious problems in communication, they are able to make you get used to the situations when you cannot see the speaker, which-as we all know-can be quite challenging as body language is completely left out from the conversation. At the same time they are great fun. Who hasn’t got memories from their childhood listening again and again to their favourite tales on the record-player? Discover this experience again!
Some sites that offer English audio books can be found here:
Enjoy the listening!:)
Do you listen to audio books? Did you find them useful? Can you list some that might be useful at the different stages of language learning?
