For vocab acquisition, is it better to just read, or read while listening?

When working with a new written text, do you let students read quietly, or do you read aloud the text as the class reads? Below is a summary of a recent paper I came across, shared by the Oasis people at the University of York, together with some comments of my own.

The paper is: Malone, J., Hui, B., Pandža, N. & Tytko, T. (2025). Eye movements, item modality, and multimodal second language vocabulary learning: Processing and outcomes. Language Learning.

When students learn new words in a second language, recognising them on the page is only part of the story. To really “know” a word, students also need to remember how it sounds, what it means and the company the word tends to keep. These are all aspects of depth of vocabulary knowledge — recall that breadth of vocabulary knowledge is not enough. The question here is whether students learn vocabulary better by reading alone, or by reading while listening.

The study above used eye-tracking technology to find out how learners process and remember new words while reading, compared with reading plus listening. The study followed 119 English learners from different language backgrounds. After completing tests of English proficiency, memory, and reading speed, students were randomly assigned to one of two groups:

1. Reading only: Students read a nine-chapter story.

2. Reading while listening: Students read the same story while hearing the audio version.

The story contained 25 pseudowords (invented vocabulary items), each appearing ten times. Eye tracking captured how long students looked at each new word as it repeated. Afterwards, they took vocabulary tests to measure how well they recognised the words in writing and how well they remembered their spoken forms. (Using pseudowords ensured that the participants did not already know the words.)

This is what the researchers found:

Students who read while listening:

• Took a little longer to process the story.

• Built stronger links between written and spoken forms of the new words.

• Remembered pronunciation more effectively.

Students who read without audio:

• Showed stronger performance on written tests than audio tests.

• Learned what words looked like but struggled more to remember how they sounded.

Importantly, adding audio did not harm written word learning. It simply strengthened the spoken side of vocabulary knowledge.

Implications

The findings suggest that reading while listening can be valuable for building spoken vocabulary knowledge and phonological memory for words. Even though this method slows reading, it helps students develop richer mental representations of new words — how they look, how they sound, and what they mean.

Teachers might consider therefore:

• Using storybooks or graded readers with built-in audio.

• Letting students read while hearing a steady, clear narration.

• Pairing new vocabulary with both written and spoken exposure in digital platforms.

My own comments

This looks like an example of transfer — the idea that you get good at doing what you practise. If you hear words, you'll develop better phonological memory for vocab and better listening skill. It may also be the case that making students listen as they read forces them to go more slowly and process the language more thoroughly. The result could be greater depth of knowledge (aural + written) and better reading and listening development. In addition, grammar skill may also be developed marginally better with listening + reading.

In my own practice, I much preferred reading a text to classes as they listened. If I let students read silently, although they could go at their own pace, my fear was that their minds would wander and little language would be processed. I also wanted them to hear the language to reinforce good pronunciation and develop better phonological memory.

There are some great activities you can do which involve reading while listening. As well as traditional question-answer, true/false and matching tasks which can be doen after the reading, you have:

• Correct the transcript (aka faulty transcript) — where students have a transcript in front of them which differs in a few ways from the version they hear. Students must replace words they see with the ones they hear.
• Complete the transcript - a form of gap-fill with just a few missing words or chunks.
• Re-order the transcript - where senetnces or short pargraphs are jumbled and students put them in the right order.
• Shadow reading/listening - where students listen, read and almost simultaneously mutter out loud what they are hearing.
• Shadow reading/listening with pauses - as above, but the teacher pauses every now and again, allowing the students to say aloud the last few words they heard.
• Listen and highlight - where students highlight or underline words they do not know as they listen. they can then look these up or obtain explanations from the teacher or a partner.
• Correct the spelling - in the written transcript certain words are deliberately mis-spelled, for example adjectives may lack agreements or contain unwanted agreements. Students identify errors both from their prior knowledge and from what they hear.

Think how much thorough processing of language the above tasks generate.