We talk a lot about the benefits of creating an audiobook out of your children’s book: reaching out to new audiences, generating more revenue, etc. But, there’s one benefit that may be important beyond all of that:
Audiobooks geared toward young readers can help them learn to read.
The practice of reading along to text you are listening to, or, Reading While Listening (RWL) has been the subject of several studies, to determine if this practice can help new readers improve there skills – and the evidence shows that it’s likely that it does improve reading skills.
The 2017 study, “Does Reading-While-Listening Enhance Students’ Reading Fluency? Preliminary Results from School Experiments in Rural Uganda“, concludes that:
“The preliminary results of this study demonstrate that the RWL app is a promising tool to potentially improve both reading comprehension and fluency of the English language… Our study shows a significant word count per minute improvement in the treatment group compared to the controlled group over a 30 day period of regular use.”
So by creating an audiobook version of your book, and making it available to young readers, you may very well be helping them learn to read!
If you’d like to bring your children’s book to life, reach out to us – we’d love to help you!
Brad Grochowski, aka, TheVoiceOfBrad, is a voice over artist that specializes in narrating children’s books. As the founder of KidsBookNaration.com, he has dedicated himself to working with independent authors, publishers and small presses, to bring their print and ebooks into audio format by educating them on the process of audiobook production, as well as offering his services as a professional narrator and producer.