The Impact of Reading While Listening to Audiobooks in Fostering Kazakh EFL Learners’ Multisensory Learning Abilities

Abstract

Reading while listening (RWL) to audiobooks can effectively improve reading comprehension and overall literacy skills. Audiobooks provide an auditory experience that can enhance comprehension, especially for students struggling with decoding or fluency. Students listening to audiobooks can internalize and model the pacing, expression, and prosody demonstrated by the narrator, thereby improving their reading fluency. The current study aimed to identify the impact of RWL on audiobooks in enhancing Kazakh EFL learners' multisensory learning abilities, such as visual and auditory learning. The experimental research design was used to determine a cause-and-effect relationship between using RWL and audiobooks in improving multisensory learning abilities of learners and listening-only (LO) comprehension. The true experimental design was used in this research study, in which the group was divided into control and experimental groups to implement the treatment for the experimental group. The participants were 1st-year students studying English as a compulsory course at the Philology Faculty of Khoja Ahmet Yassawi International Kazakh-Turkish University. A quantitative data collection method was used to collect and analyze the data. Inferential statistics in terms of Independent samples t-test and Paired samples t-test were used to analyze the data. The results reveal that the experimental group’s students who instructed using RWL to audiobooks of the novel performed better than the control group's students who instructed using listening only to the novel. Accordingly, the impact of RWL on audiobooks in fostering multisensory learning abilities of Kazakh EFL learners was approved. Ultimately, learners can improve their multisensory learning abilities by RWL to audiobooks compared to those who listen only to audiobooks.