About Sound Learning

All students need to learn and practice listening skills. Basic skills include:
- Identifying main ideas
- Recalling details
- Sequencing events
- Drawing conclusions
- Identifying perspectives
- Predicting outcomes
Practicing these literacy skills in the context of listening can transfer to the realm of reading, and vice versa.
All students need to be able to speak with clarity, coherence, and emphasis. Listening to audio clips of renowned speakers, governmental leaders, and experts in various fields may give students a greater appreciation for and understanding of how to apply rhetorical devices and speaking strategies in their own private and public speaking.
By listening to audio files, auditory learners and students with reading difficulties can absorb new information aurally, either to access content or to support future reading. Reading information they have just heard about can then become easier, because students have an established base of knowledge on which to place new information.
Working within a literacy-rich environment, English language learners can use audio clips to hear formal oral language in authentic contexts. When audio clips are paired with written texts, English language learners may enhance their ability to connect what they read with what they hear and achieve English fluency more quickly than they would with texts alone.
Struggling adolescent readers are typically motivated by real-life reading materials. Audio files can generate initial interest in a topic, create context for future reading experiences, and provide a motivating connection to life-long reading and listening.
Listening to the issues of the day, presented in summaries, debates, and interviews, may motivate students, as future citizens, to care about and participate in our democratic process and to be critical and engaged members of society.

Why Audio Clips?

Why use them? Who benefits?