Sunday, April 13, 2008
more thoughts on audio books
I started listening to a new book today, and was startled by the use of accents for certain characters, which got me thinking about what purpose they play in a story. In this story, the characters were from different countries, so their accents reinforced that and actually helped in keeping certain points of the plot together (which characters were from the same place, etc.) That is one thing that is definitely hard to replicate when one is reading from text, or with a screen reader. I've seen a few books where the author does an admirable job of writing certain character's dialogue more or less phonetically, but only a few, and only for a couple characters who were supposed to have pronounced accents. A few years ago I took a TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) course, and one of the activities was to 'translate' into written English some sentences that were written in a phonetic alphabet, and also to 'translate' some written English sentences into there phonetic written equivalent. We had to identify our region and what dialect we spoke, since the accent changed how one would pronounce certain words. This is a depth that totally falls away in written text...the nuances of regional accents. Anyway, it was interesting to muse about the effect of accents on the processing of the story...
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Interestingly, I have had a number of students who struggled reading dialects written phonetically in literature and often had to make an attempt to read those sections aloud myself - not always with an entirely accurate accent - to give them a sense of how to read the words. Audio books would have helped tremendously to do this. Many of these students struggled with reading in general, so the unfamiliar text made it even harder for them to understand the literature and did not reinforce some of the skills they were learning.
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