How to Learn English With Audiobooks (and Why Reading Along Helps)

Listen to an English audiobook while you read the same words on the page or screen. Researchers call this reading while listening, and for English learners it beats listening alone by a wide margin. In one study, learners could translate about eight times as many new words after reading along as after hearing the same kind of story with no text. Choose a book a little easier than you think you need, listen for 20 to 30 minutes a day, and keep the text in front of you until you can follow the narrator without it.

Below is what the research says, a simple daily routine, where to find free English audiobooks, which books to start with at each level, and how to read along with any audiobook you own.

Can you learn English just by listening to audiobooks?

Not at the start. Listening only works when you already understand most of what you hear.

Researchers measure this as lexical coverage: the share of words in a text you already know. In a 2013 study in Applied Linguistics, van Zeeland and Schmitt found that most listeners understood informal spoken stories adequately when they knew about 90% of the words, and learners understood well, with much less variation, at 95%. That means knowing roughly the 2,000 to 3,000 most common word families. Below that, too many unknown words fly past at once.

Audio alone is also a poor way to pick up new words. In a 2008 study, Japanese university students who only listened to a graded reader could translate 2% of its new words afterwards, and three months later they remembered none of them unprompted.

That is why beginners who put on a novel and hope it sinks in usually give up after a chapter. The narrator never slows down, there is nothing to look back at, and a word you do not recognise is gone before you can catch it. Listening alone becomes useful later, once you can follow a story with only the odd gap. Until then, give your eyes the words too.

What the research says about reading along

The studies agree on one point: reading while listening beats listening alone.

• More new words. In the 2008 study by Brown, Waring and Donkaewbua, 35 students each read three graded readers, one by reading, one by reading while listening and one by listening only. Straight afterwards they could translate 16% of the new words after reading while listening, 15% after reading, and 2% after listening only. 72% preferred reading while listening. Nobody preferred listening only.
• Better listening. In a 13-week study in ELT Journal, Chang and Millett had learners work through ten graded readers by reading, reading while listening, or listening. The reading-while-listening group "produced the most consistent and significant outcome" on listening tests.
• Better understanding and more interest. In a 2009 study of 84 college students, Chang found that reading while listening raised comprehension of short stories by about 10% over listening only. Students also found the tasks easier, the stories more interesting, and said they paid better attention.
• It adds up over many books. In a 2015 study, Webb and Chang had 61 Taiwanese learners read ten graded readers with audio. Learners showed relative gains of 44% on the target words right after, and 37% three months later.

What reading along does not do is beat silent reading by much. For new words, reading while listening and reading alone came out about equal in the 2008 study. A 2023 review of 30 studies by Clinton-Lisell found only a trivial comprehension advantage over reading alone, and it disappeared when readers could set their own pace.

So the audio's main job is not to make reading better. It is to train your ear, set a steady pace, and make longer books manageable. Most of these studies used Asian university students, and none tested word-by-word highlighting directly, so treat the numbers as a guide, not a promise.

Three things happen when you read and listen at once:

• You learn how words sound. English spelling is a poor guide to pronunciation. Seeing "though", "through" and "tough" while a narrator says them ties each sound to its spelling.
• You hear where words begin and end. Fast speech runs words together. Following the text shows you that "wanna" is "want to" and "d'you" is "do you".
• You keep going. The narrator sets the pace, so you read further than you would alone, and the text catches you when the audio gets ahead of you.

A simple routine that works

1. Pick an easy book. Read the first page. If you know almost every word and can follow the story, it is the right level. The Extensive Reading Foundation suggests knowing about 98% of the words for comfortable reading, and choosing audiobooks one or two levels below your reading level, because listening usually lags behind reading.
2. First listen, eyes on the text. Play a chapter or 10 minutes and follow every word. Do not stop to look things up. Aim to understand the story, not every word.
3. Replay the hard parts. Go back to a sentence you did not catch, read it, then listen again until you can hear each word.
4. Shadow a few lines. Pause and say a sentence out loud, copying the narrator's rhythm and stress. This trains your speaking as well as your ear.
5. Note five words. Only words you saw more than once, or that you need. A short list you review beats a long list you never open.
6. Listen again without the text. Once a chapter feels easy, play it again with the screen off. If you can follow it, you are ready for the next one.

Keep sessions short and daily. Twenty minutes every day does more than two hours on Sunday. And expect to forget most new words at first. In the 2008 study, learners recalled about one in 28 new words unprompted three months later. Volume and repetition do the work, which is why finishing many easy books beats struggling through one hard one.

What speed should you use?

Audiobooks are fast for learners. ACX, Audible's audiobook production platform, says most narrators read about 9,300 words per hour, around 155 words per minute. The 2008 study slowed its recordings to 93 words per minute for its learners.

If you keep losing the thread, try 0.75x or 0.8x and move up to 1x as the words start to separate. Learners like slowing audio down, but the evidence on whether it helps comprehension is mixed. In a 1997 study, 15 learners understood more when they could control the speed, mostly by slowing it. A 2019 study of 26 adult ESL learners found no difference in quiz scores. Use a slow speed as a stepping stone, not a permanent setting. We cover speeds in more detail in what speed to listen to audiobooks at.

Where to find free English audiobooks

• LibriVox. Free recordings of public domain books, read by volunteers. Quality varies, so play a sample and pick a reader whose voice is clear. Most classics have more than one version.
• Internet Archive. Hosts the LibriVox collection plus older recordings.
• British Council LearnEnglish audio series. Free stories written for learners and grouped by level, with exercises before and after each episode.
• Graded readers with audio. The Extensive Reading Foundation notes that almost all graded readers come with audio recordings. Oxford Bookworms, Penguin Readers and Cambridge readers all publish levelled books. Your library may lend them.
• Books you already own. If you have bought an English audiobook as an ordinary audio file, you can use it for reading along too.

We cover free sources in more depth in free read-along audiobooks.

Which English audiobooks to start with

These are public domain classics with free LibriVox recordings, ordered roughly by difficulty. Older books use some old-fashioned words, so expect a few you will never need.

Beginner (A2 and below). Start with graded readers rather than original novels. They are written to your level and almost always include audio. Free options are shorter: a few of Aesop's fables a day, or the British Council audio series.

Intermediate (B1 to B2).

• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum: simple sentences, a clear plot.
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: short chapters, lots of dialogue.
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle: each story takes about an hour, so you finish something every week.
• Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery: everyday vocabulary and conversation.

Advanced (C1 and up).

• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: formal, witty, long sentences.
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: rich descriptive vocabulary.
• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: clever dialogue, some old slang.

If a book feels like hard work after three chapters, drop it and pick an easier one. Finishing books is what builds the habit.

How to read along with any audiobook in HushBook

Most audiobooks come without text, and free LibriVox recordings never include a synced transcript. HushBook fills that gap. It transcribes an audiobook on your phone and highlights each word as the narrator says it, so you always see exactly what you hear.

For English learners it helps in a few specific ways:

• Tap a word to hear it again. Tap any word in the text and the audio jumps there, so replaying a sentence takes one tap instead of scrubbing back.
• Slow it down. Playback runs from 0.5x to 3x, and the highlighting stays in sync at every speed.
• Free books built in. Browse and download LibriVox and Internet Archive titles inside the app, or import an MP3, M4A or M4B file you own.
• Private. The transcript is made on your phone. Your audio is never uploaded and there is no account.

Two honest limits. The text comes from speech recognition, so unusual names and old words can come out wrong now and then. And HushBook cannot import protected files such as Audible downloads. For those, Audible's own Read & Listen works if you also own the Kindle ebook, which we explain in can you read along with Audible.

Sources

• Brown, Waring and Donkaewbua (2008), "Incidental vocabulary acquisition from reading, reading-while-listening, and listening to stories", Reading in a Foreign Language
• Chang and Millett (2014), "The effect of extensive listening on developing L2 listening fluency: some hard evidence", ELT Journal
• Chang (2009), "Gains to L2 listeners from reading while listening vs. listening only in comprehending short stories", System
• Webb and Chang (2015), "Second language vocabulary learning through extensive reading with audio support", Language Teaching Research
• Clinton-Lisell (2023), "Does Reading While Listening to Text Improve Comprehension Compared to Reading Only? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis", Educational Research: Theory and Practice
• van Zeeland and Schmitt (2013), "Lexical coverage in L1 and L2 listening comprehension", Applied Linguistics
• Extensive Reading Foundation (2011), "Guide to Extensive Reading"
• ACX, "How long will my narrated audiobook be?"
• Zhao (1997), "The effects of listeners' control of speech rate on second language comprehension", Applied Linguistics
• Novak, Bunn and Kenyon (2019), "The Effects of Time Expansion on English as a Second Language Individuals", Proceedings of Interspeech
• British Council LearnEnglish, "Audio series"
• LibriVox: About LibriVox