Audiobooks for YL: where to find and how to use

Listening activities are very important for beginners and are a powerful tool for learning a foreign language for both children and adults. It is no secret that the age when children go to school is the most favorable for learning a foreign language.

And the development of listening skills allows you to master the sound aspect of speech, it’s phonemes and intonation, rhythm, stress, methodology.

Through listening, the lexical structure of the language and its grammatical structure are mastered. At the same time, listening facilitates the mastery of speaking, reading and writing. Understanding the language of sounds makes it easier for students to understand graphic language, that is, to decode what they see to how it should sound.

In addition to audio recordings from textbooks, there are many other resources that can be of interest to both teachers who work with primary school children and parents who are happy to spend time with their child learning.

1. AudioBook Treasury is an excellent resource with audiobooks for all ages and levels, where you can find a large number of stories just for children.

Here you can find both classic works (“The Wizard of Oz”, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, “Alice’s Adventure in the Wonderland”, etc.) and works by modern children’s writers.

All audiobooks contain short audio recordings (2 — 5 minutes) that can be listened to without spending the entire lesson. That is, one book can be listened to in parts during 4 — 5 lessons.

2. Another great resource where you can find interesting stories, fairy tales, and fiction for children it’s LoyalBooks. Here you can not only listen to audiobooks, but also download free e-books for children.

3. Storynory is a website where you can also listen to and download audio for free.

All materials are offered in categories (“Fairy tales”, “Modern authors”, “Myths and legends”, etc.). Below each audio file there is a text that can also be used for learning together with the recording.

4. Teacher Scholastic is a resource where you can find a large number of interactive books that you can listen to, and after each story — complete tasks.

For the youngest learners we offer a selection of links where you can find short bright stories and fairy tales with wonderful illustrations:

• Project work. When the children have finished listening to the book, you can organize a project: draw the main characters or comics, create an advertising campaign for the book they have listened to, come up with a cover with the title and author, etc.
• Alternatively, you can download a story, prepare an excerpt from the text for learners with missing words or even whole sentences. The task for the learners is to fill in the gaps with the missing information while listening to the recording.
• Divide the students into two teams (team A and team B), for example, 5 people each. Each team listens to their own piece of story, and then each member of team A chooses a member of team B to pair up with, and they tell each other what they heard. 
• Drawing while listening. All you need to do is prepare a short recording (audio) with a piece of story and give the children the task to draw what they imagine while listening to the audio.
• Developing imagination. First, students listen to the first part of a fairy tale or story, and then they need to be given time to discuss how the story might end. After the discussion, turn on the second part of the audio story and compare the children’s ideas with what they’ve heard.

We hope that this selection of resources and activities will help not only teachers, but also parents and children to develop and improve their listening skills, and to spend their free time together with pleasure.