Reading and listening comprehension

Oral Language Leads to Literacy: Listening and Reading Comprehension

• Oral Language Leads to Literacy: Listening and Reading Comprehension
• The simple view of reading comprehension (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990) is a widely accepted model of the reading process (Hoffman, 2009). According to the simple view, development in two basic areas makes reading comprehension possible: decoding skills and listening skills. Comprehension requires increased automaticity of decoding accompanied by an increase in the same general cognitive and language abilities that enable listening comprehension. The simple view has been represented in the following formula (Moats, 2009; Hoffman, 2009):

Reading = Decoding x Language Comprehension

• Reading = Decoding x Language Comprehension
• According to the simple view, decoding and language (i.e., listening) comprehension ability are necessary for reading comprehension. If students lack decoding skills, they can still comprehend with strong listening comprehension ability – as long they can listen to text being read. However, if students have weak listening comprehension ability, they will also have difficulty with reading comprehension, even if they learn how to decode well.
• Carlisle and Rice (2002) explain how the relationship between reading and listening comprehension changes as children learn to read:
• In the first few years of learning to read, children with age-appropriate language development can understand much more challenging books through listening than they can read. As first graders, for example, they might listen to books like Seuss’s Horton Hatches the Egg with comprehension and enjoyment. However, they do not have the necessary word reading skills to read such a book on their own. They can read Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham because the simple words in this story are in their reading vocabulary; however, this book, while it is enjoyed for its humor, presents few challenges to their language comprehension. (p. 22)