Faculty of Humanities
Application for funding from the Humanities
Teaching Enhancement and Student Success Fund 2011/12
Summary sheet
Title of project
Reaching Out to (New) Readers through the Use of Audiobooks
Outline of project
This project is conceived as an outreach activity complementing the final
year core language classes and aiming at engaging students with reading
advanced texts and enjoying literature through weekly reading groups
and audiobooks. It is a student-centred and task-orientated project that
involves the creation of an audiobook by its participants and their use of
some of the standard features in Blackboard i.e. tests and quizzes,
wiki/blog or journal, voice tools.
Name(s) of applicant(s)
Dr. Susana Lorenzo-Zamorano
Email(s)
Susana.lorenzo@manchester.ac.uk
Tel:
275 8045
School
Languages, Linguistics and Cultures
Name of programme(s) or unit(s)
SPLA 30210 Spanish Language 3
Is it credit-bearing?
Yes (20 credits, compulsory unit)
Year of study
2011-12
Number of students to benefit?
Approximately 150 students during 2011/2012, with a potential generic
roll-out benefit across core language teaching in SLLC
Please attach a page of A4 answering the following questions and providing any other information you think will be
helpful. Faculty eLearning teams can be contacted at: elearning@manchester.ac.uk or x65544 to provide assistance
with proposals.

Background
Due to time and content constraints in the language curriculum, literature is only seen fragmentarily inside the
classroom and few are the students that take on the task of reading for pleasure. What is more, students nowadays
tend to perceive literature as more complex than other subjects and many of them fail to see the connections it has
with other topics within the discipline. This distancing effect is actually depriving students from a set of valuable
transferable skills and a level of cognitive development that only reading literature can provide and it is certainly not
helping when it comes to language performance.
The proposed project is an attempt to reach out to reluctant and potential readers by sharing reading with them and
thus creating a reading community that goes beyond the classroom. It is also an attempt to establish a greater link
between language and content modules that focus on literature. The main tool to achieve this aim will be audiobooks
which are currently in the spotlight for their general benefits but have not had an extensive use in language teaching in
Higher Education. More specifically, the project contemplates integrating a minimum selection of short stories in the
form of audiobooks into our language curriculum and expand it into a wider reading schedule for get-together weekly
sessions whose participants will have the final task of creating and launching their own audiobook in the form of a short
story and making it available as downloadable media on our course website and through the use of digital music
players.

What will the development achieve?
i)
The project will enhance the student experience in terms of extra support and self-confidence and therefore will
increase student satisfaction.
ii)
It will promote advanced literacy and an enjoyment of reading and will help create lifelong readers.
iii) It will have a positive impact on students’ performance in language but also across a number of departmental
course units that focus on Hispanic cultural studies as it will facilitate content-area understanding.
iv) It will provide students with knowledge and transferable skills that will enable them to have a better understanding
of the world and will enhance their employability.
v)
It will help to create a sense of community in a discipline that for the past few years has kept a very high and
increasing student uptake.
vi) It will promote creative thinking and will put the student at the center of their learning.

How do the outputs align with the Faculty or School’s teaching and learning priorities?
The project addresses the personalised learning agenda underpinning the Manchester Undergraduate Education
Review in the context of the increasing demands created by the rapid growth in our own student numbers. More
specifically, this project provides students with more means of self-expression and interaction with tutors and peers,
enhances our teaching provision by bringing to the fore the principles of blended and inclusive learning as it promotes
the use of online technologies and reaches out to students with very different individual needs, all of which is
ultimately in line with Goal 2 of the Manchester 2015 Agenda (Higher Learning). Students undertaking the project can
also include it in their HEAR (Higher Education Achievement Record) as further proof of their commitment to
broadening their knowledge and skills.

How will the outputs enhance learning?
The project will enhance learning through the following means:

-
Classroom literature teasers involving playing a short audiobook to all students in the classroom to entice
readers and recruit participants;
-
Face-to-face sessions (one hour weekly) to listen to the scheduled audiobook together, help participants
understand the text and discuss the book in a relaxed atmosphere;
-
The use of various tools within Blackboard: students will have to contribute to a literature blog, wiki or journal,
complete some online post reading comprehension and language exercises and, ultimately, produce an
audiobook to be published in Blackboard. The final purpose is to build an archive of ideas on the works studied
plus a digital library with student-authored audiobooks.
How many students will the outputs benefit, actually and potentially, and how are you going to ensure they
complete the activities?
The pilot project will be open to all our approximately 150 students in final year although in real terms, and considering
our staff resources, we would expect to recruit one third of them. Provided results are successful we would consider
two options:
-
Converting the project into an optional credit-bearing module in the 2012/13 academic session. This module
would have the appeal of being open to all our nearly 600 undergraduates doing a core Spanish unit according
to their level of language competence and not their level of university study.
-
Rolling the project out to other levels of language so that we can get an ideal target group of 150 students (50
per level of language). This modality would maintain the extracurricular nature of the original project and
would not be credit-bearing as with the previous option.
NB: Rolling the project out to other languages within the School is also another possibility.
Final year students have consistently asked for more assessed work and are considerably more motivated to do extra
work than students in the previous levels of language. This is also why the applicant thinks it is the ideal target group
for this project. However, in order to ensure both the necessary recruitment and participants completing the activities,
10% of the final mark for the course would be assigned to this project as it involves both written and oral production. A
selection of short stories will also be published in our Spanish newspaper thus offering an extra motivation and linking
our various language enhancement activities at departmental level.

How will the outputs be sustained after project funding ceases?
The project will be self-sustaining once we have purchased a decent number of audiobooks for student use. These
audiobooks will be eventually stored in the Language Centre and therefore made available to anyone that wants to use
them. Wimba voice tools and other free downloadable recording software such as Audacity will be promoted for the
creation of the student audiobook as their final task. This means that, after the first year, the project will not incur
further costs to the School or faculty although the need for more staff involved, as the project rolls out, must be
considered.

How will the outputs be evaluated, by students and by others?
The research and evaluation is originally conceived as an evaluative case study with the dual purpose of providing
evidence of
-
effectiveness in terms of student engagement with the course and our online environment;
-
effectiveness in terms of student language learning and acquisition of key and lifelong skills.
A multi-method and multi-perspective approach to data collection based on both quantitative and qualitative data will
be employed to meet this aim, including student questionnaires (self-ratings in a number of skills) and course unit
evaluations, numerical data on the use of the VLE, interviews with students and staff, and Blackboard discussions.

A brief outline (no specifications needed) of the type of equipment needed and how it will support the
project
-
Mainly various sets of audiobooks, some for future use and the others as a reward to participants during the
first year. The audiobooks in mind cost £13.99 each and are a selection of short stories representing various
cultures of the Spanish-speaking world in order to provide the student with a variety of models of
pronunciation, intonation, rhythm and fluency that we may not necessarily have at departmental level.
-
Help of the IT team and their advice on the appropriateness of recording and archiving tools within
Blackboard.
-
(Laptop with inbuilt microphone and speakers to play the audiobooks and demonstrate how to use the
required online applications)