Teachers are allowed to use audiobooks to teach GCSE English.
Literacy charities claim playing recorded stories during lessons can be “the key to unlocking students’ love of reading”.
But critics fear their use risks lowering standards and damaging reading abilities.
Primary and secondary schools in England, Wales and Scotland are allowed to play audiobooks in the classroom, where their use is at the discretion of individual teachers.
On Monday, it emerged that one black GCSE pupil, 16, had to sit through his classmates’ laughter and stares when an audiobook version of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men played aloud the slur “n—-r” uncensored during an English lesson.
The book will be removed from the GCSE curriculum in Wales in September because of its use of the term.
On online forums, teachers claim to have played audiobooks in the classroom when they are unwell, to limit disruption and because it can be “exhausting… to read in an emphatic and performative way while managing a class”.
Chris McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, told The Telegraph that the use of audiobooks was “saddening”.
“It’s dehumanising a crucial relationship between teacher and pupil,” he said. “The foundation stone of learning is personal contact between pupil and teacher so if a machine is taking over, you are removing that.
“It won’t make children better readers. It may be useful on occasion. In the 1950s we used to listen to the radio from time to time and that was an aid to learning.
“But audiobooks will not solve the crisis in the love of reading. Kids are increasingly captured by technology and if you have technology reading to them as well, it makes them even more captured.
“It’s a sort of literacy cocaine, this stuff, because it provides more of what they already have too much of, when what they haven’t got enough of is human contact.”
