“What I noticed was that while she understood the written word, she often had no idea how words were pronounced, and sometimes there was a disconnect when she heard a word and didn’t recognize it as the written word she knew well.”
Close captioning is a great tool for this. We only watch tv with the captioning on. My kids were early readers. My friend a reading specialist claims it was because of the captioning. I don’t know about that but I do believe captionibg of the news taught them how to properly pronounce places like Oconomowoc. Menominee ,Waukesha and Mackinac Island. That’s what a lot of local weather watching ( with some tourist ads) give you. Lol.
^^^ There is evidence based research on the value of closed captioning for pre-readers, children with learning difficulties and adults. I think Finland is a leader in promoting closed captioning on any television children watch.
After college, S2 embarked on serious reading (including, I strongly suspect, many books he didn’t read for his courses). He is a huge fan of audiobooks; he has always been an auditory learner and like Shawdad’s son, he cranks up the speed of the recordings as well. He has some LD issues, and I’ve wondered recently if audiobooks might have helped him in HS and college. The rest of us in the house eat, sleep and drink books, and S2 was nowhere near as voracious. That was ok, but I wonder now if his visual-spatial problems caused issues we never realized, because he was doing very well on all the usual objective markers.
Is there any way to “highlight” passages in an audiobook? That part was always a struggle for S – he could never find the parts he wanted to cite when writing papers, and the highlighting while reading just seemed enormously difficult. Highlighting in Kindle books was a bit easier.
@eyemamom, Shawson still finds reading fatiguing and worked very hard at reading and writing. He got a perfect score on the verbal GREs. We knew he would be at the top at math but that reading was surprising. He has finished grad school (MBA and MS Computational and Mathematical Engineering). Now he has a job that doesn’t place a heavy emphasis on reading. He still listens to several books a week at 4-5 times normal speed. Sounds like Xhosa.
My younger son listens to a lot of foreign policy podcasts when commuting. He’s another fan of cranking up the speed and taught me you can do it with most youtube videos as well. What a revelation! Painting demonstrations are so much better when sped up!
I read a lot-both by audio books and by traditional “reading” and I do not buy the line of thinking that you cannot say you have read a book unless you see the book.
@shawbridge We found a specific college for S that didn’t have those 2 years of pre reqs and instead did clusters of 3 classes of the two different disciplines he wasn’t majoring in, which made it doable for him.
He never liked fiction but he listens to podcasts now and stays pretty informed.
He managed to find his way around his dyslexia.
I heard dyslexia is unheard of in Asian cultures, I wonder if that’s true or just not dx’d
We did the same. @eyemamom: A college with no distribution requirements.
As a non-dyslexic, there are books whose elegance of writing I appreciate much more with hard copy (the first chapter of Atonement by Ian McEwen, books by V.S. Naipul, as examples). Popular business books I am happy to read by listening. I can put it on 1.5 speed (will work to two) and listen and get the general idea. I have written a couple of books and the more recent one came out with an audio version. The reader sounds like an automaton. But, people said they liked it. but, I suspect that ShawSon would appreciate Naipul better by listening.
I don’t enjoy audio books or kindles/e-readers for myself. However, my two youngest sons are dyslexic and I used audio books for both of them throughout their school careers. The youngest is currently in college and he will sometimes email me a page or two from a textbook that he is having trouble with and then call me so I can read it to him over the phone. He finds that hearing the text helps him remember it more. For me, I think that if I ever lose my vision, I would use audio books, but not otherwise.