Professional audiobook narrators help bridge the ‘understanding gap’
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| AudioFile Magazine |
Medium: 9.08.2018 by AudioFile Magazine *
Educators and cognitive scientists recognize that “reading” is a very broad term. In the audiobook community, we already know that “reading” can and does mean critical listening as well as visual understanding of printed text. Pushback still comes from some who believe that“to read” is to decode visually. I like to call them reading “print-bound purists.” As most long-established “eye-readers” know, assumptions about characters, plot direction, and capacity to grasp how facts in chapter one will be required in chapter seven, can and do miss the mark on any first complete reading of a book. How many of these print-bound purists re-read texts — silently, of course, as 20th century pedagogy taught many of us to be a requirement of “skillful” reading?
Professional audiobook narrators, in fact, are the people who do that essential pre-reading for us before we sit down to acquire the author’s work by listening to interpretive choices that make sense the first time around as listening readers. Professional narrators, having familiarized themselves thoroughly with the book before the recording session begins, know and impart appropriate pacing and alterations in inflections that we can have from the get-go when we hear their reading. Passages dense with significant and complex information are delivered in a manner that allows us to concentrate point by point instead of rushing by without collecting what we need for understanding the next stage of the work. And when personal names may be too close for eye comfort, narrators introduce specific tones — if not outright voices — that allow us to distinguish between speakers readily.
Try these audiobooks as examples of how reading comprehension can receive significant boosts from hearing skilled narrators:
What do I need to understand about this character? The
War that Saved My Life, by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, read by
Jane Entwistle
How can I make sense of all these technical explanations
when I’m not even sure which clause is important? Death
by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries, by Neil DeGrasse
Tyson, read by Dion Graham
Who’s who when I see a cavalcade of character names that I
can’t distinguish among quickly? Death
Notice, by Zhou Haohui, translated by Zac Haluza, read by Joel de
la Fuente
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