Reading and listening comprehension Pdf

Talk in the Classroom.

• B. Power

• Linguistics, Education

• 2001

Traditionally, language has been divided into four main skills – listening, speaking, reading and writing. Until the mid-19 century, schools tended to focus on the written language. Foreign languages…

• View 1 excerpt, cites methods

Reading Psychology, 26:55–80, 2005

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2005 Taylor & Francis Inc.

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DOI: 10.1080/02702710590910584

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LISTENING AND READING

COMPREHENSION OF DIFFERENT TYPES OF TEXT AT

INCREASING GRADE LEVELS

IRENE-ANNA N. DIAKIDOY

Department of Psychology, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus

POLYXENI STYLIANOU

Agrokipia Elementary School and University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus

CHRISTINA KAREFILLIDOU and PANAYIOTA PAPAGEORGIOU

Department of Psychology, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus

This study examined the hypotheses that [a] the relationship between listening

and reading comprehension becomes stronger after decoding mastery; [b] the dif-

ference between listening and reading decreases with increasing grade level; and

[c] similar patterns of relationship and difference are obtained with narrative

and expository texts. The sample included 612 students in Grades 2, 4, 6, and

8. Students read and listened to two narratives and two expository texts and

completed corresponding comprehension tests that were in the form of sentence

verification tasks. The findings confirmed the first two hypotheses but not the

third one. In the case of expository text, the relationship between listening and

reading comprehension was weaker than the corresponding one with narrative

text, and performance levels were comparable across all elementary grades. More-

over, reading comprehension levels were higher than listening comprehension levels

in Grade 8, regardless of text type. The implications of these findings with respect

to the dominant unitary process model and the assessment and instruction of oral

and written language comprehension are discussed.

By the time children enter school, they have acquired to various

degrees the skills that enable them to use and understand oral lan-

guage in a variety of contexts [Snow, 1983; Wells, 1986]. Despite

the acknowledged differences between oral and written language

This research was supported by an Elva Knight Research Grant from the International

Reading Association to the first author.

We thank George Spanoudes for his help in data analyses, and the students for their

enthusiastic participation and their teachers and principals who made their participation

possible.

Address correspondence to Irene-Anna N. Diakidoy, Department of Psychology, Uni-

versity of Cyprus, P.O. Box 20537, Nicosia CY-1678, Cyprus. E-mail: eddiak@ucy.ac.cy

55

56 I.-A. N. Diakidoy et al.

[Perfetti, 1987; Tannen, 1985], such skills have been commonly

associated with later reading achievement. This assumption un-

derlies much of the emergent literacy research [Eller, Pappas, &

Brown, 1988; Feitelson, Goldstein, Iraqi, & Share, 1993; Senechal,

LeFevre, Thomas, & Daley, 1998] and the assessment of reading, as

indicated by the inclusion of listening comprehension measures in

various standardized tests and reading inventories [Burns & Roe,

1993; Johns, 1994; Kertoy & Goetz, 1995]. Listening comprehen-

sion figures prominently as a component in theoretical models of

reading [e.g., Hoover & Gough, 1990; Joshi & Aaron, 2000] and

has been considered to provide the base for the acquisition of

reading comprehension skills [Sticht & James, 1984]. The extent,

however, to which this is true across the reading tasks that differ-

ent text types represent has not received any attention. Therefore,

the present study examined the relationship between listening and

reading comprehension at increasing grade levels, and the extent

to which it is influenced by the type of text.

Differences between oral and written language concern both

the course of their development as well as the nature of the lin-

guistic stimulus they present. The acquisition of oral language pre-

cedes the acquisition of written language, and it is a natural process

that takes place gradually in highly contextualized situations. On

the other hand, the acquisition of written language depends on

formal, systematic instruction and occurs in more decontextual-

ized situations [Snow, 1983]. Although spoken language is more

likely to contain fragments instead of complete sentences, listeners

can take advantage of extra-linguistic clues, such as gestures and

prosodic information, such as stress and intonation [Akinnaso,

1985; Sinatra, 1990]. Moreover, listeners and speakers share the

same context, and, therefore, spoken language is characterized

by greater involvement and interaction [Akinnaso, 1985; Biber,

1982]. Consideration of such differences has led to the advance-

ment of the dual process view which postulates that, although read-

ing and listening comprehension share some common elements,

they essentially represent different processes [Samuels, 1987; see

also Sinatra, 1990].

On the other hand, Sticht and his colleagues have advanced

the position that listening comprehension and reading compre-

hension are highly interrelated [Sticht, Beck, Hauke, Kleinman,

& James, 1974]. Their extensive review of the available studies led

The Relationship Between Listening and Reading 57

them to conclude that both listening and reading comprehen-

sion depend on the same general comprehension process. There-

fore, after decoding skills have been mastered, performance on

listening and reading comprehension tasks should be compara-

ble. Moreover, listening comprehension level represents a poten-

tial for reading comprehension. Specifically, they have argued that

listening comprehension skill facilitates the acquisition and pre-

dicts the level of skill that will be achieved in reading [Sticht et al.,

1974; Sticht & James, 1984]. Their position essentially represents a

contrasting unitary process view, according to which the same com-

prehension process underlies both listening and reading [Sinatra,

1990].

Support for a unitary process view has come from studies that

have shown input modality [listening vs. reading tasks] to have no

effect on the recall of meaningful and syntactically well-structured

word strings [Guthrie & Tyler, 1976] and on the recall and sum-

marization of stories [Kintsch & Kozminsky, 1977; Smiley, Oakley,

Worthen, Campione, & Brown, 1977]. Moreover, Sinatra [1990]

found a facilitative effect in comparison times when an identical

auditory stimulus preceded the presentation of two visual stim-

uli. Since that effect was manifested for meaningful sentences,

syntactic word strings, and random word strings but not for ran-

dom nonword strings, Sinatra [1990] concluded that listening and

reading processing converge at the lexical level as well. Additional

support for the unitary process view has also come from studies

that have shown directly listening comprehension to predict read-

ing comprehension skill [Curtis, 1980], and instructional inter-

ventions targeting listening comprehension to generally have pos-

itive effects on reading comprehension performance [Pearson &

Fielding, 1982; Sticht et al., 1974].

Although the relationship between listening and reading com-

prehension is assumed to be unidirectional early on, it is also ex-

pected that differences between listening and reading compre-

hension diminish over time and as a result of print exposure

[Perfetti, 1987; Sticht & James, 1984]. On the basis of their re-

view, Sticht et al. [1974] concluded that up to Grade 7, listen-

ing comprehension ability is higher than reading comprehension

ability, whereas in adulthood the direction of the difference is re-

versed. Curtis [1980] found that the relationship between reading

skill and listening comprehension changed as a function of age,

58 I.-A. N. Diakidoy et al.

with correlations at the Grade 2 level being significantly differ-

ent from the correlations at the Grade 5 level. More interestingly,

Hendrick and Cunningham [1995] found that wide reading was

associated with greater listening comprehension skill at Grade 4.

Although their study was not specifically designed to test direction-

ality, their results support the possibility of a reciprocal relationship

[Hendrick & Cunningham, 1995]. The present study examined

the relationship and the differences between listening and read-

ing comprehension levels at Grades 2, 4, 6, and 8. On the basis

of previous research and claims, we expected the relationship to

become stronger and the differences to decrease with increasing

grade level.

The studies that examined the effects of presentation mode

on the recall and summarizing of text [i.e., Kintsch & Kozminsky,

1977; Smiley et al., 1977], as well as those that examined the effects

of listening to text being read on the acquisition of literacy and

learning in general [Eller et al., 1988; Feitelson et al., 1993], have

all used narrative texts. It can be argued, however, that printed nar-

rative text is closer to oral discourse with narrative characteristics,

such as contextual situatedness and temporal/causal sequences

[Biber, 1982; Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994], and which oc-

curs frequently in everyday conversation, such as when one nar-

rates what happened at work or over a weekend. Moreover, young

children can be typically expected to have had more exposure

to oral narrative text structures in highly interactive contexts that

guide and facilitate comprehension, such as story reading at home

[Neuman, 1996]. Finally, the information in narrative text is more

likely to be familiar and its organization more likely to be pre-

dictable [Graesser, Swamer, Baggett, & Sell, 1996]. Therefore, it

is not clear whether the strong relationship between listening and

reading comprehension that has been observed so far is also due

to mediating factors, such as the similarity of the communicative

task[s] that oral and printed narration represent, their high fre-

quency of occurrence in both modalities, and/or the familiarity

and concreteness of their content.

Kintsch and Kozminski [1977] and Sinatra [1990] have sug-

gested the possibility that listening and reading processes may

diverge when it comes to processing lengthy and difficult text.

Expository text is more likely to contain unfamiliar information

and to have an underlying abstract and logical structure [Singer,

The Relationship Between Listening and Reading 59

Harkness, & Stewart, 1997]. Moreover, expository text structures

are diverse [Englert & Hiebert, 1984], and, therefore, readers and

listeners cannot rely on the activation of a single schema the way

they can rely on the activation of a story schema to guide their com-

prehension of narrative text. Although students are increasingly

expected to read and learn from expository text with increasing

grade level, they have little opportunity to encounter and inter-

act with this text type in the early grades [Duke, 2000]. Finally,

oral expository discourse, such as lectures and public speeches, is

much more infrequent than oral narrative discourse. It can be ar-

gued, then, that these factors—unfamiliar content and structure

and low frequency of occurrence—increase the relative difficulty

of expository text in terms of processing demands and in com-

parison to narrative text. Therefore, in the present study both ex-

pository and narrative texts were presented orally and in printed

form.

In summary, the purpose of this study was to evaluate [a] the

relationship between listening and reading comprehension at in-

creasing grade levels, and [b] the effects of text type on listening

and reading comprehension levels. With respect to this second

goal, it was predicted that both listening and reading comprehen-

sion performance will be higher for narrative than expository text.

However, it was also expected that with increasing grade level the

differences between listening and reading comprehension of nar-

rative and expository text will decrease as a result of increased

exposure to oral and written expository structures. Finally, of inter-

est was also the extent to which the relationship between listening

and reading comprehension evolves in a similar manner across the

different text types, as would be predicted by the unitary-process

view.

Method

Participants

The sample included 612 students enrolled in three elementary

schools and two middle schools located in different medium-

sized towns in the island nation of Cyprus. Overall, there were

135 second graders [65 males and 70 females], 151 fourth graders

[79 males and 72 females], 151 sixth graders [70 males and

60 I.-A. N. Diakidoy et al.

81 females], and 177 eighth graders [95 males and 82 females].

All students were fluent speakers of Greek. In order to obtain

an indication of Receptive Language Ability across grade levels,

the method developed by Levin et al. [1997] was adapted and

employed in this study. Specifically, the names of the students in

each participating classroom were printed on separate index cards.

Then each classroom teacher was asked to evaluate each student’s

written and oral language comprehension ability by sorting the

corresponding card into one of five categories: very high, high,

average, low, very low [Levin et al., 1997]. In cases where teach-

ers classified the majority of their students into one or two cat-

egories only, they were asked to discuss at length any language

comprehension differences between the students within a cate-

gory and to reclassify accordingly. Teacher ratings ranged from

1to5with higher scores assigned to higher ability categories.

This measure indicated that the students, as a sample, represented

a wide range of Receptive Language Ability levels [M=3.15,

SD =1.23]. In addition, their school achievement levels ranged

from low [3.5] to high [10.0] as indicated by previous year’s Grade

Point Averages [M=7.87, SD =1.50]. The correlation coeffi-

cient between Teacher ratings and Grade Point Average was 0.77

[p=.00].

Materials

TEXTS

A preliminary list of forty short stories, articles, and excerpts

from books, magazines, and encyclopaedias was compiled. Seven

independent teachers, whose teaching experience ranged from

seven to 22 years, read and rated each text for topic familiarity,

number of potentially unfamiliar words, and overall text difficulty

for each grade level. Texts that were judged by all teachers to have

an unfamiliar topic but relatively few unfamiliar words, and to be

moderately difficult but appropriate for a given grade level were

included in the final list [see Appendix]. From this list, two nar-

ratives [271 to 376 words long] and two expositories [262 to 356

words long] were selected for each grade. The expository texts ei-

ther described and elaborated on the characteristics of animals,

physical locations, archaeological findings, astronomical phenom-

ena, and groups of people [Appendix, Texts 1, 5, 8, 11, 13, and 16]

The Relationship Between Listening and Reading 61

or presented facts and details related to socio-cultural topics and

issues [Appendix, Texts 6 and 14]. Therefore, the predominant

expository structures were description and enumeration [Englert

& Hiebert, 1984]. The selected texts were parsed into idea units

[van den Broek, 1989] by two independent graduate assistants. In-

terrater agreement ranged from 79% to 93%, and all differences

were resolved in conference. The selected narratives and exposi-

tories were comparable with respect to the number of idea units

per sentence [M=1.63, SD =.30, and M=1.77, SD =.36 re-

spectively, t[14] =−0.88, p=.39]. Each selected text was printed

in a separate booklet and tape recorded.

COMPREHENSION TESTS

All comprehension tests were in the form of a sentence verifi-

cation task. For each text, a list of literal and inferential statements

was constructed. Literal statements represented single idea units

extracted verbatim from the text [Pearson & Johnson, 1978]. In-

ferential statements represented implicit referential, causal, super-

ordinate goal, generalization, and comparison/contrast relation-

ships between idea units [Graesser et al., 1994]. Two independent

raters evaluated each statement in each list as either literal or infer-

ential. Statements for which there was 100% agreement comprised

the preliminary comprehension tests whose length ranged from 17

to 22 statements.

Fifty-four undergraduate students enrolled in a cognitive psy-

chology course listened to each tape-recorded text and completed

the corresponding preliminary comprehension test. Items that

were not answered correctly by two or more students [18% of the

items, on the average, across tests] were excluded. From the re-

maining items, 14 were selected for inclusion in a final comprehen-

sion test for each text. Specifically, each final comprehension test

included seven literal and seven inferential statements, each fol-

lowed by a Yes/No option. In each test there was an equal number

of Yes and No correct responses. Each correct response received

a score of 1 and each incorrect response a score of 0. The scores

received by each student for each statement were summed and con-

verted to proportions, yielding six measures: Listening Compre-

hension, Reading Comprehension, Narrative Listening Compre-

hension, Expository Listening Comprehension, Narrative Reading

Comprehension, and Expository Reading Comprehension. The

62 I.-A. N. Diakidoy et al.

order of statement presentation in each test was randomized, and

two comprehension test versions with different orders were created

for each text.

Procedure

For the purposes of the study, the students remained in their in-

tact classrooms, and data were collected during the first half of

the school year. The study was completed in two 40 min. sessions

scheduled from two to seven days apart. In each session, students

read and listened to one narrative and one expository text. As a

result, half of all the students in each grade level read a particular

text while the rest heard that same text. Presentation Mode [oral

vs. written], Text Type [narrative vs. expository], and order of pre-

sentation were counterbalanced between classrooms and sessions.

Students listened to or read each text only once. Subsequently, the

written text booklets were collected, and the students completed

the corresponging comprehension test. They were instructed to

read each statement carefully, to decide whether it was true on the

basis of the text they had just read or listened, and to circle Yes or

No accordingly. Comprehension test version was counterbalanced

between students.

Results

Relationship Between Listening and Reading Comprehension

Preliminary analyses indicated that all dependent variables,

Listening Comprehension, Reading Comprehension, Narrative

Listening Comprehension, Narrative Reading Comprehension,

Expository Listening Comprehension, and Expository Reading

Comprehension had normal distributions [skewness .05]. Moreover,

one-way Analysis of Variance indicated that School had no signif-

icant effect, and, therefore, this variable was excluded from sub-

sequent analyses. Listening and Reading Comprehension Scores

were significantly correlated with each other at all grade levels [ p