To Listen is to Read? : A Qualitative Study of Differences and Similarities Between Reading and Listening from an Educational Perspective

Audiobooks have become increasingly popular and accessible during the past couple of years. Concurrently, students’ reading comprehension has decreased. Therefore, teachers must work toward improving students’ reading comprehension but also relate to audiobooks as a phenomenon. Thus, this qualitative study aimed to explore similarities and differences between reading comprehension and listening comprehension through previous research, an examination of the course Svenska 1 and interviews with three professionals within the target area. The curriculum of Svenska 1 legitimises the use of audiobooks and does not specify the concept of reading, therefore allowing teachers to interpret whether audiobooks should or can be used. Although the input is of different characters in the two modalities, the phase of processing and comprehending is similar. Moreover, listening comprehension is a biologically primary ability and can suit students with a limited working memory. According to the findings of this study, students struggling with word decoding can linguistically assimilate more complex texts through the auditive modality. Hence, audiobooks can be used in educational purpose since they provide linguistic content and practice students’ empathy. However, listeners mainly extract the gist of a text. Therefore, they rely more on background knowledge and logic rules when reconstructing a text. Consequently, listening can burden students’ working memory and listeners sometimes miss the intended meaning of a text. Finally, background knowledge, motivation, strategies and word decoding are what researchers believe to be most important for reading comprehension. Even more skilled readers need to practice their decoding skills and therefore a recommendation is to teach decoding parallel to knowledge acquisition, which can be provided through audiobooks.