Why Can't John Read? Perhaps He's Not a Good Listener

Abstract

The relationship between listening comprehension and reading comprehension was investigated. Written and oral comprehension tasks were presented to two groups of readers, matched for IQ and chronological age but differing in their reading ability. The skilled-reader group consistently performed better than poor readers in both reading and listening tasks. The results suggest that reading comprehension and listening comprehension are dependent on the same general language processing skills and that poor readers are also poor listeners. Implications for these findings for teaching the reading disabled child are suggested.