“Talking books” are used in some beginning reading and reading tutorial programs as a reading-while-listening tool for teaching grapho-phonemic awareness, word recognition, fluency, and pronunciation. Typically, children listen to an audiotape or computer narration of a story and follow along in a copy of the text. For most children, the fixed narration rate is much faster than their own reading rate, with the result that the text they hear sometimes differs from the one they read. This article examines the effect of giving children control of the narration rate and shows an advantage for reading while listening under this condition, as opposed to with a fixed narration rate.

The article contains the following sections:

• Introduction
• Design and Method
• Results
• Discussion
• Directions for Future Research
• Summing Up
• References
• Software Sample

Bergman is an educational technology researcher at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzeliya, Israel. The work described in this article was conducted at the Bar Ilan University, with the help of Dr. Miriam Faust. He is currently developing two practical applications of educational technology: one makes use of voice-recognition technology to teach reading, and the second is a streaming video summarizing tool. He can be reached by e-mail at rutuofer@netvision.net.il.