Reading or Listening?

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Reading or Listening?

                Yesterday on the ACT, I read that some educators think that students should be allowed to listen to assigned literary works on audio recordings instead of out of a book, if they choose.  However, I am pretty opposed to this idea, because I can foresee only detrimental effects.  I think our society is becoming too dependent on technology as it is, and this would only be encouraging further independence within the education system.  I just don’t think it’s the way to go.

                First of all, allowing students to listen to audio recordings of their literature instead of reading them would create a handicap, as they would become more or less addicted to this method of ‘reading,’ which would be preparing them to fail in college and the workforce, where reading is an essential skill that needs to be reinforced as early as possible.  In fact, elementary school students wouldn’t even feel the need to learn how to read, which would make the entire education system fall apart, and would be setting these kids up for disaster in their later school years and throughout their lives.  Our society would quickly grow less and less literate, and would eventually become stupider.

                In addition, listening to an audio recording requires far less focus than reading.  When reading from a book, students are forced to focus all of their attention on reading and comprehending, allowing little to no distraction.  Reading is an active process.  In contrast, listening is a passive process.  When listening to a tape, students would be tempted to ‘multi-task,’ and therefore would be paying little to no attention to their literature, because they are not forced to do so.  Their mind would be free to wander, and not pay attention to what is being read to them.  In the end, they probably wouldn’t get the full benefit out of their assigned literature, and would come to class unprepared.

                Finally, listening to a recording as opposed to reading is much slower.  Reading out of a book is much faster than listening to a story being read to you, which is quite important to students’ schedules nowadays.  The number of activities available to students is larger than ever, and they need to manage their time as efficiently as possible in order to take advantage of all these extracurricular activities in addition to getting all of their homework done.  They simply don’t have time to listen to a tape being read to them.