Audio books are great in a lot of different ways!

• They can help support reading by giving clues to signposts 

• They can foster a love of reading because of the ability of students to access content that may be above their decoding level.  Connecting them with books they find engaging.

• New York Times article: Part of the confusion comes from how we tend to think reading works. Learning to read with the eyes starts with decoding, linking letters to sounds and meaning. But once those pathways are built, the brain draws on the same language network to make sense of words, whether they arrive through sight or sound. A 2019 study in The Journal of Neuroscience by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, found that the brains of people reading or listening to the same stories processed meaning in almost the same way. Focused listening lights up those networks just as print does... Youngsters who read daily for enjoyment tend to develop stronger skills and score higher in school — on average, roughly the equivalent of a year and a half ahead, according to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data on student performance in member countries. Some research suggests they’re also more likely to keep reading for pleasure later in life. According to last year’s survey by the National Literacy Trust of Britain, younger people who grew up with audiobooks and podcasts were already reporting a preference for listening over traditional text-only reading. And pairing print and audio has been shown to improve comprehension for some struggling readers, especially when decoding written text is a barrier.

Bannon, Brian . Opinion Guest Essay: “Do Audiobooks Count as Reading?” New York Times, 23 Nov. 2025.