Earphone English

It's lunchtime at Berkeley High School, and for the next 45 minutes, the school's 3,500 students are free to scatter across the street to the park behind City Hall. Berkeley High may be one of the last high schools in California with an open campus, but just because its students have permission to leave the grounds doesn't mean they do. For hundreds of students, lunchtime is spent getting tutorial help, studying in the school library, or attending club meetings. For a couple dozen of these kids, lunch period means walking over to Heidi Ramirez Weber's English Language Learners' classroom to participate in a free-flowing literary discussion in a new language—English.

Thirteen percent of Berkeley High's student body come from homes where English is not the primary language. Luckily, these kids have access to Earphone English, a student club sponsored through a partnership between Berkeley High and the Berkeley Public Library. The club, which meets once a week, offers students a number of opportunities to practice their spoken and aural English skills, including regular visits from the public library's staff, field trips, book discussions, and audiobooks, the heart of the program. As club members listen to popular audiobook titles, they hear well-spoken English and become better acquainted with English language books. They also get a chance to read the same titles that their friends with stronger English literacy skills are reading. As a librarian, I receive an additional perk: real-life feedback that helps me evaluate audiobooks intended for adolescents— crucial information when you're building an audiobook collection.

As for our anything-but-boring group discussions, Earphone English members discuss both books-on-tape and conventional books at an energetic pace. In addition to the typical book discussion questions, we examine how well the narrator's delivery fits the text, how clear and understandable the vocabulary is (or isn't), and special audio production features, such as music, interviews, and even the occasional lapses of mysterious silence. It's all fodder for meaningful, incisive discussions. Some teens are particularly sensitive to the gender of the narrator, a topic that has fueled several discussions. ("The reader should have been a young black person, and she sounded like an old white woman.") This group of readers favors realistic novels and autobiographies rather than short stories or fantasy. They find issues of identity, family conflict, loss, and personal power during extreme circumstances (such as the Holocaust) particularly appealing. It's also not unusual for us to talk about our personal experiences.

Many of our audiobook listeners also prize multicultural content. One of the attractions of Looking for Alibrandi, for example, is the protagonist's status as a member of an immigrant family, even though the story is set in Australia—not America—and the immigrants came from Italy—not the Middle East or Latin America. Pam Munoz Ryan's Esperanza Rising appeals to teens who have emigrated from Mexico, but also to those who have moved here after losing their fathers to violence in the former Yugoslavia. Sharon Creech's Bloomability takes place in a multiethnic, multicultural school where practically no one is a native English speaker. Earphone English listeners found the accented English in Bloomability to be an ego booster, leading me to reassess a recording that I had initially dismissed as aesthetically flawed. The wide range of audiobooks gives club members the building blocks for approaching new ideas with critical thinking skills—and that's exactly what a liberal education is all about.

Earphone English has made a difference in students' everyday lives. Those teens who practiced their pronunciation skills by reading aloud to kindergartners over the course of a semester reported that audiobook listening had increased their skills as oral readers. The proof of that was reported with pride by one of our members who was originally from Lebanon. "The kids used to play around while I was reading," she said. "Now they're quiet and they listen to me read. I know how to make my voice do the right things to match the punctuation." The kindergarten teacher concurs, noting that Earphone English members' oral reading skills spiked after just a month of listening to audiobooks.

How did it all begin? Two years ago, inspired by the writings of librarians and educators, I took our public library's teen collection where it had not gone before—into the realm of audiobooks. By making audiobooks a prominent part of the collection, I hoped to reach teens who were unfamiliar with written English, as well as those who had reading problems or had been turned off to reading. A California State Library grant of $6,000 provided the funding needed to create a robust audiobook collection of 150 titles.

I soon began tracking the new audiobook collection's users and was not terribly surprised to find that English language learners listen to books written above the vocabulary and syntax levels they are comfortable reading. As our audiobook collection grew, I wanted to obtain some direct input from English language learners. So Heidi and I set up a pilot group with five teens at Berkeley High, and each week, I supplied them with the new review tapes that I received.

The lunch group included two sisters from Pakistan who previously had an unhappy experience with audiobooks. In middle school, when they spoke very little English, a well-meaning teacher had insisted that they listen to picture-book tapes that were clearly intended for preschoolers. While the level of the English may well have been appropriate, the stories' content, coupled with the fact that the girls were sent to study hall to use these juvenile kits, made the experience memorably dreadful. I had to demonstrate the possible worth of audiobooks fast for this pair. Annette Curtis Klause's Blood and Chocolate proved an excellent choice for the elder, a 17-year-old who hadn't realized how delicious she would find horror fiction. And Melina Marchetta's Looking for Alibrandi delighted her 15-year-old sibling with its intelligent yet poor heroine who is self-conscious of her family's immigrant status. A third student, a Lebanese teenager from a refugee family, had no access to books, in any language or format, as a child. She had been in the U.S. for less than six months when we first met and yearned to read anything and everything. The sole boy in the pilot group came from a home where there was considerable reading, all of it in Spanish. The fifth member, also Spanish speaking, was a confirmed reader, but was so shy when speaking English that she remained silent through the early months of our meetings.

Heidi and I quickly learned to put aside our few assumptions and rules. One assumption that was immediately yanked out from under us was that students would read the printed text along with the audiobook. This arrangement worked for some listeners some of the time, but not for most. We discovered that some students wanted to listen first and then see the print version, others wanted the reverse, and still others wanted a distinct separation between their "listening books" and their "reading books."

We initially thought it would be best if we all read the same titles prior to discussing them. Wrong again. It turned out that we didn't need to read the same book in the same week to have a rip-roaring book discussion. The teens (as well as the adults) booktalked each other, shared titles between meetings, and compared and contrasted literary themes, plots, and recording features, such as the musical interludes between chapters and the narrator's pace and tone. We discovered that we weren't at all frustrated by a universal lack of familiarity with one unifying text. One rule that we have maintained, however, is that club members give each book and audiobook a fair chance. That means listening to the entire first chapter of an audiobook, or listening to it for a half-hour, or reading the first 30 pages of a print-bound book—whichever takes the longest. If the selection doesn't seem accessible or enjoyable after that, it's put aside. We want kids to enjoy reading, not to find it a chore.

The pilot project grew to include 24 members and was such a hit that we decided to expand the club. My role as a public librarian, we all agreed, would be to provide an endless supply of audiobooks, occasional pizzas, and discussion lead-ins. Heidi would provide the classroom space during lunchtime, and supply her colleagues and the students' parents with information about the program. The teens themselves, however, would become primarily responsible for getting their peers involved.

It turned out that the students were very persuasive recruiters. Some of the kids wrote about the club in the school newspaper. Others spoke formally to the English Language Learners' classes, demonstrating their improved verbal skills and a genuine enthusiasm for books. The classroom audiences responded big time, and we now have 32 high school members, as well as 25 middle school members.

Now, each Friday at lunchtime, someone new appears in Heidi's classroom, often a young man or woman who has just enrolled at Berkeley High after arriving from Russia, Spain, or China. Some spend their time snacking, listening to the discussion but clearly not yet ready to speak; other new members expound on their week's listening, too busy to swallow more than a mouthful of food. At the end of each meeting, students ask me to bring various items to our next gathering, such as print books without any audiobook edition, or print texts to augment specific audiobooks. There are often requests for audio versions of books that the teens are trying to read, but even more frequent are requests for audiobooks that make for good listening and discussions. "Can you bring some love stories next time, please, please?" ask the students.