Our lives are increasingly complex and diverse. We spend our time in such a range of different ways that keeping things anchored can be a challenge for us all.
At times of our most active learning, such as during our teenage years, working out how to balance our interests can be a significant challenge. We can be in the midst of a learning journey without necessarily having worked out our preferences, styles and efficient learning methods.
The good news is that there is no shortage of different channels for emerging learners to choose from. The challenge can be picking and choosing. And there is solid evidence that audiobooks could play an instrumental role for teen readers.
Audiobooks offer a reliable learning channel to build knowledge, understanding and overall literacy levels. They are emerging as a preferred channel, particularly for male teens, who value audio as a way to consume and understand information.
Another factor is time. Audiobooks can be slotted into underused interstitial time, such as daily commutes, down time between other activities, and as part of relaxation time.
Upon this strong foundation comes the next generation of audiobook development, personalised audiobooks. Personalised audiobooks offer a way to create works in your own voice by providing a short voice sample to generative voice technologies. This could be a powerful new tool in building reading confidence, reinforcing key messages at pivotal learning stages, and communicating complex information in open and accessible ways.
There are benefits to building literacy skills in a blended way. For example, audiobooks offer expressive voices that vary the delivery, pace and emphasis, often in ways that help learners to more fully understand complex sentences or words that are new to them.
With an incredible range of tools now at our disposal, it’s an exciting time to be exploring how we can best deploy these solutions in ways that support better outcomes in ways tailored to emerging readers. Personalised audiobooks offer an important new frontier to develop and explore. There are more exciting learning journeys ahead.