In my experience, almost all ESL textbooks published nowadays have an audio track that accompanies the reading. So it is now very easy for teachers to do "listen and read" activities.
The audio track will usually be in a CD accompanying the textbook, or (much more common nowadays) an audio file that can be played from the classroom computer.
A number of these audio files also make their way onto Youtube--see for example HERE. Mostly, I suspect, this is in violation of their copyright. But nonetheless, if you are ever teaching from a book, and you don't have the audio track on your school's drive, try searching Youtube.
If you still can't find the audio (or if you're teaching from an older textbook that just plain doesn't have an accompanying audio) you can always create the audio yourself by reading the text aloud for your students.
The activity is pretty much exactly as it sounds. The students open their textbooks up to the reading passage. The teacher says something like, "Now, I'm going to play the audio. I want you to listen and follow along in your book." Then, the teacher plays the audio track (using the classroom speakers) and the students listen and follow along with the reading text.
Doing Listen and Read activities are controversial in some circles. A few years ago, when I was at a new school, and was getting observed for the first time, I did a Listen and Read activity, and my manager lowered my observation grade because of it. "When students are listening and reading at the same time," he explained to me, "then they're not doing either, really."
So, the moral of the story is, not everyone approves of this activity, and if you're in a new school, check with the manager first before doing a Listen and Read activity.
Despite some people's reservations about this activity, the potential advantages of Listen and Read are:
1) Listening and reading at the same time can enhance the input, and make the grammatical and vocabulary features more noticeable for the students.
2) If the voice actor on the audio is sufficiently talented (and in professional published materials a lot of them are), they can infuse the words with some dramatic intonation. This can not only help to convey the meaning of the text, but it can also make it more interesting for the students.
3) It can increase reading speed fluency, by forcing the students to try to keep their reading speed in sync with the audio.
4) If you're trying to get the students to read a text quickly for gist (in preparation for a second, more detailed reading to follow), and you don't want the students to stop and puzzle over unknown words yet, then the audio can help keep the pacing of a gist reading.
5) Possibly it might help students learn about sound/spelling correspondences. And possibly it might even help them acquire the pronunciation of words in cases where the pronunciation is not obvious from the written form alone (e.g. syllable stress, silent letters, etc.). Although in my experience, in practice during Listen and Read activities, the students are so focused on the written text that the aural form of the word doesn't seem to stick. (It has long been observed that in cases where students are presented with both the written form and spoken form of the word, the written form seems to override the spoken form. I've noticed the same thing with myself when I am studying Vietnamese.)
In my own classroom, I used to use Listen and Read activities a lot when I was doing Graded Readers as in class reading.
Nowadays, I use the audio as an aid to readings from the textbook. I primarily use it to increase student interest in the text, and also to help keep the pace for the gist reading.
I will typically assign either a gist reading question, or a prediction and check activity before playing the audio. Then I'll play the audio, and the students will either listen and read to answer the gist question, or listen and read to check their predictions.
Although, I should add a small caveat here: I have noticed that often students will get so involved in the activity of following the words with the audio that they will often not be focusing on the meaning of the text, and subsequently are unable to answer the gist question (or the prediction check) at the end. When I remind them of the gist question (or the prediction check) after the audio has finished, sometimes I can see on their faces that they completely forgot about the task, and then they quickly skim the text again to find the answers.
But in spite of this, I still feel like the Listen and Read activity has some value in getting the students through the first initial reading, before I ask them to examine the text in more detail.
See also:
* I've previously discussed this point in Comprehensible Input in Young Learner Classes
* My own material for Listen and Read activities can be found at English Reading and Listening Practice
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