Launching #Readalongs: Audio stories that make language acquisition more fun

This Teachers’ Day, StoryWeaver  is pleased to announce the launch of a delightful set of audio stories for children, called Readalongs. Artfully narrated, and subtitled, these Readalongs bring stories alive in an engaging audio-visual form that will help children fall in love with reading.

StoryWeaver has always strived to collaborate with the educator community to find more, and increasingly better, ways to introduce children to the joy of reading. Our Readalongs are the latest addition to this offering and have been designed to be joyful experiences for the child, with enjoyable background music, and a ‘natural’ narrative voiced by professional artists. Parallelly, same language subtitling, or SLS, provides synchronised highlighted text that urges the child to “read along” with the narrator’s voice.

Suzanne Singh, Chairperson, Pratham Books, says, “Through StoryWeaver’s Readalong series of storybooks, we hope to introduce more children to the joy of reading and help them build their language acquisition skills through a combination of listening to the story and matching it to the supporting text.”

The Readalongs are aimed at the youngest of readers so a majority of the stories belong to Reading Levels 1 and 2, and are no more than 5 minutes long. Stories with repeat sounds and words, that are enjoyable to read aloud, as well as those with eye-catching illustrations, and a fair amount of dramatic flair were chosen.

The Readalong series features English and Hindi stories for now, but will be expanded to include a wider range of languages once we gain user feedback on these.

Purvi Shah, Head of Digital Platforms, Pratham Books, adds, “StoryWeaver has consistently added features and tools born out of our interaction with educators and on-ground partners. The Offline Library, which allows access to the StoryWeaver experience even in the absence of internet coverage, is one such feature. Curated Lists, accompanied by classroom activities, is another. This Teachers’ Day, we’re happy to add a third -- Readalongs. Consider it our celebration of Teachers’ Day!”

6 Comments