What is it? What does it do?
Loudlit.org is a literary reference site which provides access to a wide range of material in both text and mp3 audio form. The audio is permitted to be posted under a Creative Commons licence, whilst the text is made available under Project Gutenberg, which has published thousands of books whose copyright has expired in the US.
According to the site, by:
Putting the text and audio together, readers can learn spelling, punctuation and paragraph structure by listening and reading masterpieces of the written word. Read and listen via your web browser or on your mp3 player. Regardless of how you enjoy the audiobooks ... they are free.
The site contains 6 novels (e.g. The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain; The Heart Of Darkness - Joseph Conrad), 8 short stories (e.g. The Pit and the Pendulum - Edgar Allan Poe; To Build A Fire - Jack London), 8 children's stories (e.g. The Emperor's New Clothes - Hans Christian Andersen; Rapunzel - The Brothers Grimm) and 14 poems (e.g. The Highwayman - Alfred Noyes; The Raven - Edgar Allan Poe). It also has a couple of historical US documents.
The downloads have proved to be very popular, and some podcasts have been downloaded via iTunes over one million times. Click here for free access to
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:
The downloads have proved to be very popular, and some podcasts have been downloaded via iTunes over one million times. Click here for free access to
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:
Relevance to language learning?
It used to be believed that listeners built up their understanding of a text by working out what each individual sound was, then adding these up into a word, understanding the word, and checking the meaning of that word with the surrounding words. This theory is known as a 'bottom-up' approach. Despite its appeal, it is virtually impossible to do. It may be useful for gap-fill exercise and completing a comprehension task but not for understanding whole texts.
When we hear English being spoken used it is often too fast to adopt this item-by-item approach. An alternative theory is that when we listen to a new text (in this case, a story or poem) we start processing the text using skills associated with a 'top-down' approach. In other words, we make use of what we already know to help predict the structure, style and content of the text. From this, we can form a overall impression of the text. For an example paper on this see: Field, J (2004) An insight into listeners' problems: too much bottom-up or too much top-down? System 32/3. Extract from the abstract below:
Being able to see the text whilst listening is an integrated, top-down approach. For starters, students may not have any previous knowledge of Dickens' 'A Tale Of Two Cities', for example, but can try to work out the style (genre) and, secondly, what is going on in the text, using exisiting knowledge.
Practising 'listening' might simply be frequently exposing students to the language, with a gradual increase in familiarity. Teaching 'listening', however, begins with a premise that students have barriers to specific features of the language and that the lesson's objective should focus on those features in order for improvement to really take place.
How can it be used?
This resource has obvious benefits for the classroom and outside of it. The files can be listened to online in class or downloaded and listened to at any time using a mobile device (iPad, phone etc), making it easy for extensive reading outside of class. The sound files on the stories are well read and authentic, giving a contextual sense of the text. It is, of course, useful if the book or poem is already on the students' syllabus.
For general ELT, I would say it can be used for more mature or higher ability students (Upper intermediate).
Some particular tasks include:
- Students decide whether the text is written in the first person.
- Students to figure out where the events are taking place.
- Students to think who are the major characters and who are the minor characters.
- Chunks of text could be analysed for meaning, as there are some interesting, literary metaphors employed, as would expected, in these classics.
- Chunks of text could be jumbled up for students to re-arrange before hearing the original.
- Comprehension checks could be done, either using a True/False or Not Given quiz or trying to come up with headings or summaries of the paragraphs.
- Using an online dictionary, students could highlight the word to get a definition.
What limitations are there?
What initially looks like a great resource, has a few limitations.
Firstly, I've individually counted the number of texts available. There's not that many. It seems to have been put up and left there with no sign of anything to be added later. The last item that was added, The Mower's Song by
Andrew Marvell, was uploaded in January 2008, and brings up a 404 'unavailable' error message. So it is far from an exhaustive list. 6 novels and 8 short stories, for example. It is noble that permission has been sought and granted for these royalty -free texts, but a much wider range of texts would be better.
Secondly, due to the constraints of the texts having to be royalty-free, much of the language is high, very poetic and often archaic. Although the recordings are authentic sounding, as materials they have little relevance to authenticity of the general English that the students would hear elsewhere. The students would have to be of high ability or specialising in literature. It's not for kids!
Take this example from The Heart of Darkness (section 1, part 2):
The metaphorical allegory may well be lovely but it might prove a challenge to engage the students at the level of trying to find the meaning.
Unless I was actually teaching EFL using literature specifically, I would find it somewhat offputting to use this material.. I might use the site once or twice but, as a teacher, I would get bored with it quickly. That's before I've even tried it out on my students.
Hear me reading the above extract from Heart of Darkness and commenting about this site:
