Listening is not the Same as Reading

Audio books are popular as ever, and they make for great entertainment, but as far as I am concerned, it’s not reading. It drives me crazy when someone says they have read a particular book, when in reality, all they’ve done is listened to it. I mean, society as a whole doesn’t consider watching a movie based on a book as reading, so why should listening be much different?

My main argument is simply this: reading and listening are different skills. In all my teaching classes I’ve been told when making a lesson plan to be sure to address the four different skills; reading, writing, listening and speaking. I’ve found too that this also applies when learning a second language. And while there is certainly some crossover between the aforementioned skills, each one is its own animal. Take learning a foreign language for example. Just because you can look at a word and recognize its meaning (aka read), does not mean that you will understand the word if you only hear it and vice versa.

When it comes to audio books, many argue that it should be considered reading because you still have to apply critical thinking to what you are hearing, as well as understand the spoken words and make meaning from them. However, there are many holes in this logic. For one, by this philosophy, a simple conversation could then be considered “reading”. However, no one would ever even think of conversations as reading.

The dictionary definition of reading is “to look at carefully so as to understand the meaning of something written or printed” (Dictionary.com). By this definition, to read something is to look at the written component of a language and create meaning from the symbols. When you listen to an audio book, there is nothing to look at and infer meaning from…unless you want to count looking at the case cover.

Don’t get me wrong, audio books are great. Just don’t tell me it’s reading.

About Ed Battistella

Edwin Battistella’s latest book Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels was released by Oxford University Press in March of 2020.
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