I’ve chosen this image for this post, because we want our students, and our children to have fun and enjoy reading, to laugh, to WANT to read – and that’s about comprehension – understanding what they listen to as well as what they read!
Last post, we learned about complex the relationships between different forms of evidence of students’ comprehension, including oral expressive reading, reading comprehension, listening comprehension and written expression (Berninger & Abbott, 2010). Their study included children in Grades 1, 3, 5 & 7, in American schools, reading English.
In 2018, Merel Wolf and her colleagues, in a study with Dutch students, found that “reading comprehension explained 34% of the variance in listening comprehension, and that listening comprehension explained 40% of the variance in reading comprehension.” They strongly suggest that there is some overlap, however they qualify their results with the influence of vocabulary on both reading and listening comprehension.
The challenge with Merel Wolf’s results is whether these translate to English speaking students, like those in Virginia Berninger’s research? Dutch is a transparent language, especially compared to English. Many students easily learn to decode Dutch, whereas this is NOT the case with English, as many of us would have experienced with our students.
Also, whether listening comprehension or reading comprehension, or one generic comprehension skill exists - this is still being debated and still unknown.
What has emerged is that attention, along with vocabulary, plays a major role in listening comprehension. It may be worthwhile, for those of us orally reading to our classes, to regularly check their attention? The logic being, that it the students are actually NOT listening, then this wonderful oral reading of the class novel is literally “falling on deaf ears”?
Only by monitoring students’ comprehension of what’s being orally read to them, will a classroom teacher be able to confirm this common practice is making a difference. This could be oral or written, and would depend on the amount of time teachers choose to devote to this.
Supporting listening and reading comprehension, research evidencesuggests strongly that attention is the key! If your students aren’t listening when you’re reading, then they’re not understanding or learning?
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