Story of the Audiobook
Harris Federation Teaching & Learning Blog
by Oliver Blagden, Autumn 2021
Story of the Audiobook
“Chapter One: Story of… the DOOR.”
“STORY… of the door.”
“Story of THE door.”
And so it begins. I sit, leant forwards on the edge of my chair, face just centimetres away from the radio mic; one hand clutches a bottle of water, the other shoots out wildly as I narrate the opening line, in the vain hope that dramatic gesturing will magically bring the words to life.
It’s 2020. Lockdown is in full swing. The pandemic has devastated usual teaching and learning practice. I, along with countless teachers across the world, have been faced with the seemingly indomitable mission of ensuring that the millions of young people under our collective educational care continue to learn, recall, embed and practice new knowledge – all the while continuing to develop holistically as human beings.
Piece of cake, surely?
Well, not quite, but it had certainly pushed my team, like so many in education, to explore every far-reaching corner of the remote-learning world, a journey which had seen us engaging with a variety of multi-modal learning strategies - all designed to mitigate the detrimental impacts of lockdown on student learning.
And so this is how I found myself in the strange and rather exciting position of recording an audiobook.
Why audiobooks? They’re reading on-the-go: carefully thought-out and well-rehearsed performances of texts, with all the right thoughts, intonations and pronunciations, narrated at a manageable pace for students - which they can listen to not only in lessons but also on the bus, in the playground, in their own bedrooms, or even simply on a school-computer during lunch. They model reading fluency, reading enjoyment and, crucially, nurture those all-important listening skills, that are so often overshadowed by a curriculum focus on language analysis and writing construction.
Research around audiobooks carried out during lockdown is compelling. In 2020 the National Literacy Trust found that “during lockdown, “nearly 1 in 4 (23.4%) children and young people said that they listened to audiobooks more than before lockdown.” Whilst this in itself is an encouraging thought, the impact on young peoples’ reading and writing is even more exciting:
• 1 in 2 (52.9%) children and young people say that listening to audiobooks has increased their interest in reading, and 2 in 5 (42.6%) say that it has made them more interested in writing
• Those who listen to audiobooks are also more likely to say that they enjoy reading and writing than those who don’t listen to audiobooks (61.4% vs 40.8%)
• Similarly, more of those who listen to audiobooks say that they read daily in their free time compared with their peers who don’t listen to audiobooks (40.2% vs. 27.0%)
• Audiobooks stimulate the imagination: 7 in 10 (70.8%) children and young people who listen to audiobooks said that they use their imagination more than when they watch videos1
The message is surely clear: audiobooks are an ally in our mission to nurture a love of reading in our young people; they are likely to encourage our young people to engage with writing; and, not least, through audiobooks our children are encouraged to use their imaginations – a process that scientists are increasingly understanding to be a “complex cognitive construct” as it “involves episodic memory retrieval, visualisation, mental stimulation, spatial navigation, and future thinking.”2
Audiobooks stimulate the imagination; engagement of the imagination involves complex cognitive processes; students listening to (and truly engaging with) audiobooks are therefore being cognitively exercised.
Flash back to 2020, then, in the midst of lockdown, and I prepare for my first audiobook recording. Like a seasoned regular on the Archers (or perhaps its lesser-known rip-off, WKD) I’ve performed my vocal warm-ups, meticulously positioned my highly professional Zoom microphone (an old, dusty 2011 model), and now find myself stumbling through the opening lines of Stephenson’s gothic classic, ‘Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.’
“Chapter One: Story… of… the door?”
Really, it should be easy. I enjoy the text; the story has rich, clear characters with strong voices; the subject matter is gloriously dark and sinister; it’s a joy to read - a classic.
Then there’s my acting background, which should be an asset. All those pained hours spent deconstructing dialogue, working to understand the actions and intentions behind every single word - every beat – before wandering on-stage to try to deliver it without forgetting my lines (or worse, falling over).
I’m well-armed. What could possibly go wrong?
As it turns out, plenty.
It’s not long before I find myself confronted (and eventually commandeered) by an army of frame narrators, complex narrative structures; internal monologues, external dialogue, contrasting characterisation defined by changes in speech patterns; elongated, complex sentences that snake around the page (there’ll be a pause to breathe now any second… just you wait… hear it comes…); a multitude of strange, old-fashioned words and schema that I really should know as a subject specialist; and that’s not to mention the need for arbitrarily differing voices and accents for each character - essential to distinguish them from one another for the listener.
Let’s face it: reading aloud can be challenging. Whether the material is modern, ancient or somewhere in between, transforming that ‘little reading voice’ in your head to a ‘loud reading voice’ externally isn’t always as smooth a process as we’d like. And yet this is what we ask our students to do day-in, day-out in our classrooms.
There is a breadth of excellent research out there about how we can support our learners to become fluent readers – if you haven’t checked out Alex Quigley’s Closing the Reading Gap, (2020), I’d highly recommend. In one part of his book, Quigley helpfully includes a ‘multidimensional fluency scale rubric’3: a diagnostic tool adapted from the work of Professor Timothy Rasinski4, designed to help us be more precise in teaching the intricacies of reading fluency. Quigley breaks down fluency into four key areas: expression and volume; phrasing; smoothness; and pace. These success criteria should be, Quigley argues, targeted through various classroom strategies, including “regular reading practice […] rereading a range of texts […] promoting paired reading and choral reading,” and, of course, always “providing scaffolding”5 along the way.
When it comes to the art of recording audiobooks, for my humble part, here are eight simple lessons I learnt along the way. Who knows, maybe they’ll help you hit the ground running, should you wish to do the same for your students:
- Do your homework
You need a solid understanding of the story you are about to tell, otherwise the meaning will be lost during your performance - and your audience will become confused. You also need to have a solid grasp of each character: what are their motivations, given circumstances6 - what do they ultimately want? This will help you to bring them to life and make them feel real and rounded. Don’t underestimate this first step.
- Plan accents
Before you start reading, decide what the voices of your respective characters are going to be like, including accents. You need to do this to individualise the various characters for your listeners, which is essential in audio-narrative work. Practise these before recording until you feel comfortable with them. Don’t be afraid to exaggerate these if it helps you pin them down. Base them on characters you have seen on TV and film. These are models from which you can create new life.
- Get the setup right
This shouldn’t take long, but is vital to ensure your end product sounds as professional as possible. Invest in a good microphone if you can. Failing that - your phone will do. Record in a small room to avoid echo. Throw a blanket over yourself when recording if need be, to contain the sound. I wish I’d done this sooner.
Experiment with how near and far you should be from the mic. If too close, the audio can ‘pop,’ which snaps the listener out of the story. If too far, the narrative loses a sense of intimacy. Get the setup right, and the benefits will be subtle, but impactful.
- Pace yourself
Reading fluency often correlates with reading speed. Remember, though, that speedy reading isn’t always best. Slow down and take your listener on a journey. Respond to the formation of the words and sentences. Look for clues in the punctuation. Which parts of the story are gaining momentum, and can be performed at a faster pace? Which are more thoughtful and enigmatic? Make clear choices here to ensure variety in your expression.
- Stress (the good kind)
For me, this is perhaps the most important. I remember a director once telling me that modern audiences can’t even hope to comprehend the vast majority of Shakespearean dialogue. Classically trained actors mitigate this by choosing with precision the words they will emphasise for their audiences, which is key in communicating crucial meaning. It also adds a layer of authenticity to your performance: it is one area you have control over as a reader, allowing you to deliver the story in a way that makes sense to you.
- Power through those sentences
It is quite common, when reading, for us to drop intonation at the end of our sentences. This is strange because we seldom do it in everyday conversations. Make sure not only to keep the energy up for the duration of your sentences, but also to keep the sentences ‘alive’ at the end: as a rule keep your intonation up, which will help lift your listener up and onto your next phrase. Consequently, when you purposefully make a choice not to intonate upwards, this will resound more for your listener.
- Hydrate and rest
Vocal damage is real, and if you’re not careful, you can do yourself irreversible harm. I once developed vocal nodules (essentially a callous on your vocal chords) from excessive shouting in a tour of The Pickwick Papers, and it took months to recover. It supposedly takes four hours for your vocal chords to hydrate following a drink, so have plenty of water well in advance of reading, and take regular breaks during recording so that you don’t wear down your voice. You want to be able to come back and record more!
- Be prepared to record, rerecord… and rerecord again
It would be rare, unless you are Dickens reincarnate, to be able to ace a performed reading first-time around. Or get anywhere close, for that matter. If you are paying close attention to the detail of your performance, you should expect to have to record, stop and rerecord words, phrases and whole segments of text again. This can feel arduous - but it always pays off. Have patience, and see it as an opportunity to provide your listeners with the best possible version of the story you can.
So, if you like, take this advice and do what you will with it. Use it to record your own audiobooks. It doesn’t matter whether or not there’s a lockdown. It doesn’t matter whether or not you’ve done it before. You don’t need a performance background. Add to your students’ speaking and listening toolkit. Model reading - and a love of it. Whatever you record, or however you choose to record it: own it and enjoy it. For, as Margaret Atwood once noted: storytelling is “built into the human plan. We come with it.”7
Oh, and in case you were wondering, in the end I settled on:
“Chapter ONE: STORY of the DOOR.”
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The English Consultants’ audiobooks for ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ can be found on the Harris Home Learning Hub: https://www.harrislearninghub.org.uk/lessons/english/key-stage-4 and on Anchor.fm:
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References
1 National Literacy Trust (2020) ‘Children, young people and audiobooks before and during lockdown’ at https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-reports/children-young-people-and-audiobooks-lockdown/
2 Jung, R, Flores, R and Hunter, D (2016) ‘A new measure of imagination ability’ in Frontiers in Psychology at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00496/full
3 Quigley, A (2020), Closing the Reading Gap, Routledge p202
4 Rasinski, T (2004) Assessing Reading Fluency, PREL p19
5 Quigley, A (2020), Closing the Reading Gap, Routledge p53
6 Stanislavski, C (1936) An Actor Prepares, Taylor & Francis
7 Rothman (2021)
