Attending to the Sounds of Stories: The Affordances of Audiobooks in the English Classroom

ABSTRACT Audiobooks have been growing in popularity over the last decade. Although researchers have increasingly recognised the value of audiobooks as rich multimodal texts that support literacy engagement in classrooms, there have been few detailed pictures of classroom practice related to audiobooks. In this practitioner narrative, a secondary English teacher details the myriad ways in which he drew upon the affordances provided by audiobooks to engage ninth and tenth grade students in new forms of literacy inquiry and engagement. The article details classroom practices related to fluency and comprehension, inquiries into out-of-school and digital literacies, focusing attention in fictional worlds, and meta-discussions about the nature of the medium.