Reading while listening: why the audio helps, and how to use it

What reading while listening does

Three things, and silent reading does none of them.

• It joins the written word to its sound. Dutch spelling is mostly regular, but the sounds are not the ones an English reader expects: ui, ij, eu, the g. When you see huis and hear it in the same moment, the next huis on the page arrives with its sound. Dutch pronunciation explains the sounds one by one; the audio gives you them in whole sentences.
• It sets the pace. A voice does not stop at a word it half knows, so you do not either. You read in phrases instead of word by word, and you reach the end of the sentence, where Dutch so often puts the verb that tells you what happened.
• It is listening practice you can follow. On its own, a Dutch recording is a stream. With the text under it, every word in the stream has a shape, and that is how your ear learns to pick words out of speech: the skill you need when there is no text, at the counter or on the phone.

What the research says about reading while listening

Most of the studies are of learners of English reading graded readers with the recording, and none is about Dutch. The pattern is clear enough to use, read with its limits: the effects are real and modest, and they come from weeks of reading, not from one text.

Brown, Waring and Donkaewbua (2008) had learners meet new words in three ways: in a story they read, in a story they read while listening, and in a story they only heard, with 28 target words in each, and tested them straight after, a week later and three months later. The two reading modes taught more words than listening alone on both tests. Asked three months later to give the meanings from memory, they managed about one word in 28 from the reading modes and none from listening alone. The words that came up most often in the stories were learned most and kept longest. The lesson is not that audio teaches words. It is that audio does not get in the way of the reading, which does, and that meeting a word again matters more than how you met it.

Two studies by Chang look at the listening side. In Chang (2009), learners who read short stories while listening to them understood the stories better than learners who only listened. In Chang (2011), learners who read graded readers while listening to the audiobooks improved more than a control group in vocabulary and in listening: their dictation scores more than doubled. Reading along is a way into listening, not away from it.

Chang and Millett (2015) ran an extensive reading program for beginner learners, high-school students in Taiwan, with one group reading the books with the audio and one reading silently. The audio-assisted group improved more in reading speed and in comprehension, and the authors suggest the audio helped the students concentrate on the reading. The program was closely steered by the teacher, which later papers name as a limit. Webb and Chang (2012) looked at rereading instead: beginner readers read the same texts more than once over two seven-week periods, one group with the audio and one without. Later studies cite it as evidence that rereading with audio helps vocabulary.

The widest view is a meta-analysis by Clinton-Lisell (2023), which pooled 30 studies with 1,945 readers of all kinds. For comprehension, reading while listening came out just ahead of reading alone (g = .18, which the author calls trivial), and the advantage held only when the recording or the experimenter set the pace (g = .41); when readers could pause and go at their own speed, there was no reliable advantage. The author adds that there are too few studies of second-language learners to say whether they gain more.

Put together: audio does not replace reading, and on its own it teaches few words. It helps when it runs under a text you can read, at a pace you follow without pausing, and when you come back to the same text. That is the method below.

The audio on this site: what you are hearing

Every published free text on the reading pages has a recording, and every book that is out has one for every chapter, which the QR codes in the book open for its readers. The two kinds sound different on purpose.

Scroll sideways to see the whole table

The player is the same everywhere: four speeds (0.8, 0.9, 1.0 and 1.25), a position slider, and a memory of where you stopped and which speed you chose, kept in your browser, so chapter 2 picks up where it stopped, on the same phone. No account and no app.

How to use the audio, step by step

Listen first, or read first?

Read first, for a new text at your level. Read it once silently, tap the underlined words, and make sure you know what happens. Then play the audio and read along. Done the other way round, the voice runs ahead of a story you do not know yet, and you spend the recording looking for your place.

Listen first when the text is easy for you: a text a level below yours, or one you read last week. Then the recording is a test of your ear. Play it once without looking, decide how much you caught, and read along afterwards to fill the gaps. At A1, where almost nothing is easy yet, read first every time.

Read along, and do not stop

This is the step the research is about. Play the recording at the speed the player chose and keep your eyes on the words as the voice reads them. Do not pause for a word you half know, and do not rewind for one sentence. If you lose your place, let it run and pick up the next paragraph. The gain in comprehension that Clinton-Lisell found came only when the pace was set for the reader; a recording you stop every ten seconds is slow reading with sound. If you cannot keep up, the fix is further down, and it is not the pause button.

Reread with the audio

The second reading is where words stay (How to learn Dutch by reading explains why), and the second reading with audio is where they start to stay by ear. A simple routine: day one, read silently, then read along once. Day two, read along once more, at 1.0 if the first time was at 0.9. A week later, play it with the screen off, on a walk or on the tram. Everything you understand then, you understand by ear: you will follow it because you know the story, and that is the moment a text you have read becomes real listening practice, five minutes of Dutch you follow from beginning to end.

Shadowing: say it with the voice

Shadowing is reading aloud at the same time as the recording, half a second behind the voice, with the text in front of you. Pick one paragraph, five or six sentences, not the whole text. Play it at 0.9 and speak along; play it again at 1.0; then a third time, copying where the voice rises and falls and where it pauses. Three passes take about two minutes. Shadowing is for your mouth and your ear, not for understanding, so choose a paragraph you already understand, from a text at your level or below it. Sounds that no description gives you, the g, the ui, the stress in a long word, come more easily when you copy them whole.

When the audio is too fast

Slow it down, but not below 0.8. At 0.8 a Dracula or Alice voice reads at about 145 words a minute, close to a B1 text at full speed; slower than that, a voice stretches and stops sounding like Dutch, which is why the player goes no lower. Treat the speed the player picks as the normal speed for a book and the step below it as the speed for a new chapter; the free texts were recorded a little slower to begin with and rarely need it.

• Read first. If the voice runs ahead of you, it is usually because the story is still new, not because the audio is fast. One silent reading fixes it.
• Take a smaller piece. One paragraph, played twice at 0.8, then the next paragraph. Play the whole text in one go the next day.
• If you still cannot keep your eyes on the right line at 0.8, the text is above your reading level, not your listening level. Take one from a level down and come back to this one in a month.

Slow the audio to hear the sounds, not to understand every word. Understanding comes from the reading and the glossary; the recording is there to carry you through the sentence.

How long a session should be

Fifteen minutes a day. A free text is about three to five minutes of audio (the shortest two and a half, the longest just over five), so a session is a few minutes of silent reading with the glossary, one read-along pass, and two minutes of shadowing one paragraph. The next day, the read-along pass again, which takes five minutes, and a new text if you want one. A chapter of an A2 book is four to six minutes of audio: a chapter on Saturday and one on Sunday, each read silently and then with the audio, and an eight-chapter book takes a month next to the texts. One new text and one reread a day is a good rhythm; three new texts in a row with the audio is not, because the third one washes over you. How much to read in a week, and how the reading sits next to lessons and speaking, is in How to learn Dutch by reading.

When audio does not help

• A text far above your level. Reading while listening works when you could read the text anyway, slowly. Count the unknown words in the first 100: more than ten, and the voice reads sounds you cannot attach to meanings, however slow it goes. Take a level down. The free texts are built so that at least 90 of every 100 words are common at their level, and the rest are explained on the spot.
• Dutch in the background. A recording playing while you cook teaches almost nothing: the words come from the reading, as the 2008 study showed. Audio works with your eyes on the text or, later, with your full attention on a text you know.
• Listening instead of reading, to learn words. The words come from the reading. The audio adds sound, pace and listening practice, not vocabulary of its own.

See it in a text

Three texts with audio, one at each level, and what to listen for in each.

• A1, Fietsles, read at about 115 words a minute: Hij gaat op het zadel zitten. Hij duwt met één voet tegen de grond. De fiets rijdt. He sits down on the saddle. He pushes off with one foot against the ground. The bike goes. One short sentence, one action, one breath: a text to read along with for the first time, and the paragraph to shadow.
• A2, De buurvrouw van boven, about 130 words a minute: Elke ochtend om zes uur hoort Ana iets. Boem. Een deur gaat dicht. Dan rolt er iets heen en weer. Dan weer een deur: boem. Every morning at six Ana hears something. Bang. A door closes. Then something rolls back and forth. Then a door again: bang. A story about sounds; listen to how the voice reads Boem, and to the rhythm of heen en weer.
• B1, Trakteren, about 150 words a minute: Elif kende het woord trakteren niet, maar ze verstond ‘dinsdag’ en ‘jarig’, en ze hoorde de vriendelijke toon. Elif did not know the word trakteren, but she caught dinsdag and jarig, and she heard the friendly tone. A sentence in three parts, and the voice shows where each part ends. It is also what listening at B1 is like: you catch the words you know and the tone, and you work out the rest.

The research on this page

• Brown, R., Waring, R. and Donkaewbua, S. (2008). Incidental vocabulary acquisition from reading, reading-while-listening, and listening to stories. Reading in a Foreign Language 20(2), 136 to 163.
• Chang, A. C.-S. (2009). Gains to L2 listeners from reading while listening vs. listening only in comprehending short stories. System 37(4), 652 to 663.
• Chang, A. C.-S. (2011). The effect of reading while listening to audiobooks: Listening fluency and vocabulary gain. Asian Journal of English Language Teaching 21, 43 to 64.
• Webb, S. and Chang, A. C.-S. (2012). Vocabulary learning through assisted and unassisted repeated reading. Canadian Modern Language Review 68(3), 267 to 290.
• Chang, A. C.-S. and Millett, S. (2015). Improving reading rates and comprehension through audio-assisted extensive reading for beginner learners. System 52, 91 to 102.
• Clinton-Lisell, V. (2023). Does reading while listening to text improve comprehension compared to reading only? A systematic review and meta-analysis. Educational Research: Theory and Practice 34(3), 133 to 155.

Read next

Start with one text with audio at your level: read it silently today, read along tomorrow.

• A1: Fietsles, a father in Den Bosch who learns to ride a bike at last, read at a pace you can follow from the first sentence. The book at this level is Fairy Tales, eight tales, each with its audio through a QR code in the book.
• A2: De buurvrouw van boven, a new neighbor and a noise at six in the morning. The book at this level is Dracula, eight chapters, each with its audio through a QR code in the book.
• B1: Trakteren, a first birthday at a Dutch office. The B1 books of the series are coming soon.

Not sure of your level? The free level test takes about ten minutes. The level pages list every text with audio: A1, A2 and B1.