Audiobooks can be very helpful if you intend to improve your language skills. With this article we want to present you Lit2Go – a free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 (audiobook) format.
The project is lead by the Educational College as part of the University of South Florida and has existed since 2006. For each work you can find additional information and material. Many of the passages also have a related reading strategy identified. Each reading passage can also be downloaded as a PDF and printed for use as a read-along or as supplemental reading material for classroom activities. So if you are interested in English-language literature simply for personal use or if you are a teacher and you need some authentic material for your EFL courses, Lit2Go can be a helpful source.
Let’s explore some of the main features of Lit2Go which might be helpful to improve your English skills!
First of all, Lit2Go is a very easily structured website. In order to find a text according to your preferences there are five ways of selecting: authors, books, genres, collections and readability.
When I visited the website for the first time I really enjoyed exploring the many different works you can find there. Particularly if searching by genre you will notice that the range goes from children’s poetry to horror and philosophy to speeches and fantasy literature (only to name a few). Beyond that, the collections section offers you literature for many different topics. Looking for African-Amiercan literature or works about the Civil War? You are interested in Proto-feminist literature or science? Surely, there is a collection that fits to your interests.
One particularity of the website is the selection by readability. In order to determine its readability each text is rated according to the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level index. The Flesch-Kincaid formula considers the average number of words per sentence (average sentence length, or ASL) and the average number of syllables per word (ASW) within a given passage in order to estimate the complexity of the text. The formula then converts that complexity level into a score that roughly equates with a grade level (K-12) in the United States (read more about it on Lit2Go).
Due to the fact that the the texts are read by native speakers Lit2Go can not only be helpful to improve your listening comprehension but also to practice your pronunciation. We have created an exercise on the use of audiobooks for pronunciation purposes that gives you an idea how to implement audio books in your language learning routine.
