Difference between listening and reading comprehension

Careful listening is a valuable lifelong skill. It helps us learn language, integrate stories from our past, forge human relationships, and succeed in school and the workplace. Starting from a very early age, listening is a key skill in helping children learn to read and become better readers. Understanding the connection between listening and reading is critical in supporting literacy.

With reading scores either dropping or holding steady on the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP), we see an important opportunity nationwide to teach listening to support reading comprehension. On the 2019 NAEP Reading Assessment, two out of three students did not meet the standards for reading proficiency in the 4th or 8th grade, and only 35% of 4th graders in the U.S demonstrated reading proficiency. Listening is a missing piece of the literacy puzzle.

Research establishing the link between listening and reading goes back decades. In a 2018 webinar, literacy expert Timothy Shanahan explained that many studies have shown a large and significant relationship between children’s early language development, including listening, and later reading achievement. Given the strong link between listening and reading, it stands to reason that improving listening comprehension skills leads to stronger reading skills. However, there has been a notable lack of research in this area, in part because valid, reliable measures of listening comprehension have been lacking. 

This has changed with a new Lexile Framework® for Listening developed by Metametrics, the creators of the Lexile Framework® for Reading. In January 2020, Metametrics released a new research-based measure of audio passage complexity and student listening comprehension. With valid and reliable measures of both listening comprehension and reading comprehension, further research into the relationship between the two and how they impact literacy will be possible. The new listening measure has significant implications for teaching listening and supporting literacy in the classroom. Listenwise stories now include a Lexile audio measure indicating their level of complexity, which can be helpful in selecting appropriate stories for student listening.

What is the connection between listening and reading?

As noted in our previous blog post on the relationship between listening and reading, to understand the link between listening and reading, it helps to start with a model of reading. The “simple view” (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) breaks reading into two basic components: decoding and language comprehension. Researchers agree that most differences in students’ reading performance can be explained by variations in these two factors. Instruction in the early grades typically emphasizes decoding, or sounding out and recognizing words to translate printed text into oral language. But to become good readers, students also need listening comprehension skills, or the ability to understand language and make meaning of those words and the messages they convey.

How can listening help with reading?

As the academic emphasis moves from “learning to read” to “reading to learn,” language comprehension assumes a more prominent role. Children who have mastered decoding but lack strong comprehension skills – known as “poor comprehenders” (Hogan, 2014) – tend to fall behind as texts become more conceptually complex, containing more academic vocabulary and requiring more background knowledge to understand. 

Listening can support crucial skills necessary for improving reading. Dozens of studies have documented the importance of two key areas influencing reading level: vocabulary and background knowledge (Shanahan, 2018). Students with larger vocabularies can read and understand more complex texts. And students with background knowledge of a subject perform better on reading tests than those who encounter the subject for the first time, even if they are lower level readers (Recht & Leslie, 1988).  With these factors in mind, education journalist Natalie Wexler makes the case for asking students to take a deep dive into one subject area rather than only practicing decontextualized reading skills. Building knowledge and vocabulary around one subject, bit by bit, through different inputs, motivates students and equips them with the foundation they need to continue improving their reading. Educators are finding success in improving literacy with curriculum materials that help students develop background knowledge, vocabulary, and comprehension skills within an interdisciplinary context.

Research indicates that among many students, especially those who are not yet proficient readers, listening to a passage often results in better comprehension than reading the same passage, making listening an effective way to expose kids to complex concepts and new vocabulary. Teaching with engaging, high quality audio stories, such as those curated by Listenwise, offers opportunities for students to learn academic language and build background knowledge about a host of important topics. Struggling readers and English learners can especially benefit from listening because it allows them to engage with higher level content and participate more actively in discussions than they otherwise might. Students can focus on developing comprehension strategies such as making inferences and identifying the main idea, which apply to both listening and reading, through the engaging medium of audio, without the cognitive load of decoding.  

Brain research is further illuminating the link between listening and reading. Neuroscientists recently discovered that the same parts of the brain are activated whether a person hears words or reads them on a page. The research has implications for students with dyslexia, among others. But it also highlights the important role listening plays in learning, as a helpmate and equal partner to reading. With the new Lexile® listening measure, teachers will be better able to assess and monitor listening comprehension, and education researchers will be able to further investigate the relationship between listening and reading. 

Up next on our blog: 8 Key Listening Comprehension Skills

As humans, we have so many important ways we convey and understand information as we communicate.  We are born with ears, and are never actually taught how to listen—it’s understood how to do it, we just start. As kids, we grow up learning how to speak by listening to the people who are close to us and imitating others. Almost everyone enjoys listening to radio, watching videos, talking on the phone. All of these activities help to develop these skills, just by doing them repetitively, but how often do we focus on these skills that we take for granted? How often do we consciously think that we are learning to read when we listen?

Other language skills such as reading and writing need to be explicitly taught. Researchers have found that the four language skill areas: listening, speaking, reading, and writing are all integrated and contribute to people’s understanding of the world around them. Reading and listening are receptive skills; writing and speaking are productive skills. And according to research, there are substantial correlations among these four language processes. So when students are listening, they are also advancing their other language skills.

While listening and reading share many comprehension processes, there are differences in the way the information is processed. Readers often remember more details and can go back to the text. Listeners construct understanding as they listen and often come away with an overall understanding of ideas (Absalom and Rizzi, 2008). Students who are successful at reading comprehension understand at the sentence level as well as understanding the text as an integrated whole (Perfetti, 2007).

Comprehension = Decoding Skills + Language Skills

Reading comprehension involves both decoding print and understanding language. Once students can decode text, their comprehension is dependent on understanding language. (Catts, Hogan, and Adlof, 2005). Students who have not mastered decoding can still learn language skills by listening to stories and content read aloud. Students can listen on a higher language level than they can read, so listening provides a way to improve students’ language skills, making complex ideas more accessible to students and exposing them to vocabulary and language patterns that are not part of their everyday speech (Fountas and Pinnell 1996). For example, students may be able to listen to and understand the plot and character development of Don Quixote and his inner journey, but not be able to decode enough words on their own to make sense of the content while reading.

Increasing Language Skills by Listening

Language skills are essential in creating a mental representation of the whole text to understand it. Higher-level language skills can be developed by listening to stories. This develops language skills in all students, even those who struggle with decoding. Therefore, listening can be used to develop these essential language skills with students of all reading abilities. These language skills can then influence and enhance their reading comprehension. For example, when teaching the comprehension skill of compare/contrast, students can listen to a story about the traditional view of Genghis Khan  as a conqueror and compare that to an author’s view of Genghis Khan as a visionary. Students can learn to use high-level comprehension skills by listening to the content and working with the concepts.

Language Skills

• • Literal Knowledge: Students need to recall descriptions, facts and details to understand the meaning. This includes understanding information that is explicitly stated.
  • Vocabulary:  Students who understand content as a whole are able to construct a mental model of the story. This allows them to find the meaning of unknown words by interpreting them within the context of the story. They are more likely to choose the correct meaning of words with multiple meanings, as well as discover the meaning of words by using the context. Also, when they hear idioms and figurative language they are able to understand them within the whole context, rather than as individual words.
  • Inferencing: Students who have high comprehension make inferences as they listen, connecting pieces of text together. They fill in missing information from their prior knowledge and experience, and go beyond the literal meaning of the content (Bowyer-Crane & Snowling, 2005).
  • Main Idea: When listening, students generalize the content as a whole and identify the main ideas of the information presented. They interpret the information and how it all contributes to a main topic or issue.
  • Summarizing: When students are asked to summarize what they heard, they identify the importance of each detail and retell the key points of information and explain how they contribute to the overall ideas.
  • Analyze Point of View: Students listen to identify and evaluate the speaker’s purpose and main ideas.
  • Evaluating Reasoning: Students  evaluate the reasoning , credibility, and relevance of a speaker or author’s ideas and information.

Using Listening to Improve Reading Comprehension

After seeing the connections between the four language skills, we see the importance in teaching and assessing listening and speaking skills in schools. By growing one skill, students are developing their other language skills. There is strong evidence that higher-level language skills are critical to good reading comprehension and its development. These higher-level skills play an important role in a reader’s or listener’s construction of the meaning of a text. Each of these skills can be taught and assessed in students of all reading levels, by using high-quality listening resources. Developing and practicing these skills while listening can contribute to increased comprehension when reading. These skills can be taught through targeted instruction, discussions, and monitoring progress to meet the needs of all students.

Find more up-to-date content on our blog about the connection between reading and listening.

References

Catts, H. W., Hogan, T. P., & Adlof, S. M. (2005). Developmental changes in reading and reading disabilities. In H. W. Catts & A. G. Kamhi (Eds.), The connections between language and reading disabilities (pp. 25-40). Mahwah,NJ: Erlbaum.

Bowyer-Crane, C., & Snowling, J. (2005). Assessing children’s inference generation: What do tests of reading comprehension measure? British Journal of Educational Psychology, 75, 189-201.

Hogan, T. P., Bridges, M. S., Justice, L. M., & Cain, K. (2011). Increasing higher level language skills to improve reading comprehension. Focus on Exceptional Children, 44(3), 1-19.

Perfetti, C. A. (2007). Reading ability: Lexical quality to comprehension. Scientific Studies of Reading, 11, 357-383.

Up next on our blog: 8 Key Listening Comprehension Skills