Abstract
This study aimed to increase our understanding on the relationship between reading and listening comprehension. Both in comprehension theory and in educational practice, reading and listening comprehension are often seen as interchangeable, overlooking modality-specific aspects of them separately. Three questions were addressed. First, it was examined to what extent reading and listening comprehension comprise modality-specific, distinct skills or an overlapping, domain-general skill in terms of the amount of explained variance in one comprehension type by the opposite comprehension type. Second, general and modality-unique subskills of reading and listening comprehension were sought by assessing the contributions of the foundational skills word reading fluency, vocabulary, memory, attention, and inhibition to both comprehension types. Lastly, the practice of using either listening comprehension or vocabulary as a proxy of general comprehension was investigated. Reading and listening comprehension tasks with the same format were assessed in 85 second and third grade children. Analyses revealed that reading comprehension explained 34% of the variance in listening comprehension, and listening comprehension 40% of reading comprehension. Vocabulary and word reading fluency were found to be shared contributors to both reading and listening comprehension. None of the other cognitive skills contributed significantly to reading or listening comprehension. These results indicate that only part of the comprehension process is indeed domain-general and not influenced by the modality in which the information is provided. Especially vocabulary seems to play a large role in this domain-general part. The findings warrant a more prominent focus of modality-specific aspects of both reading and listening comprehension in research and education.
Highlights
The twenty-first century has seen an increasing reliance on obtaining information via the audio-visual channel (Rideout, Foehr, & Roberts, 2010)
The question arises whether listening and reading comprehension are, conform to how they are treated in the educational practice, the same general comprehension skill albeit with information provided in different modalities, or whether they are different processes with different underlying modality-specific skills
Word reading fluency was highly correlated with reading comprehension and moderately with listening comprehension
Summary
The twenty-first century has seen an increasing reliance on obtaining information via the audio-visual channel (Rideout, Foehr, & Roberts, 2010). This means that relatively speaking, book reading is declining among children and adolescents (Mangen, 2016; OECD, 2010), whereas consumption of audio(visual) information through, for example, TV and computer, is increasing (Rideout et al, 2010). At the same time, reading comprehension is an essential subject in primary education. It is known as an important predictor of children’s school career and lifelong learning (Spörer & Brunstein, 2009). The relationship between reading and listening comprehension should be examined
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