Abstract #2978

Abstract: We live surrounded by various texts that we read or hear. To get by in life, you need to understand texts, regardless of how they are presented, so listening and reading skills are equally important in everyday life. At school, however, teachers usually pay more attention to developing reading skills and less attention to listening skills (Aruvee, 2022; Diakidoy et al., 2005). Listening is considered one of the most challenging skills in foreign language learning, but there needs to be more research done about listening in the mother tongue. Comparatively, even less research has been done on understanding native text when reading and listening.
The children's listening skills develop unconsciously in the mother tongue even before school, but the development of reading skills is mainly dealt with at school. Douglas Fisher and Nancy Fray (2014) state that students understand the text better by listening until they are 13-14 years old, and only then will both skills reach the same level. Therefore, it is also one reason why researchers (e.g., Wagner et al., 2020) recommend listening to these texts instead of reading long texts when teaching children with reading difficulties. Therefore, teachers must pay attention to developing both skills at school.
In our presentation, we give an overview of the research, the aim of which was to find out whether 4th-grade students understand the meaning of the text more by reading or listening, and if one skill has better or worst developed, what is the other skill level. The study included 46 students whose text comprehension we tested with listening and reading tasks. The results are like those of the Fisher and Fray (2014) research and indicated that 4th-grade students better understood the information in the listening text than in the reading text.
References
Aruvee, M. (2022). Sissejuhatavalt koolidiskursusest: tekstid ja kirjaoskus neljas õppeaines [’Introduction to school discourse: Texts and literacy in four subjects’]. Eesti Rakenduslingvistika Ühingu aastaraamat, 18, 55–74. https://doi.org/10.5128/ERYa18.04
Diakidoy, I. A. N., Stylianou, P., Karefillidou, C., & Papageorgiou, P. (2005). The relationship between listening and reading comprehension of different text types at increasing grade levels. Reading psychology, 26(1), 55–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/02702710590910584
Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2014). Speaking and listening in content area learning. The Reading Teacher, 68(1), 64–69. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1296
Wagner, R. K., Zirps, F. A., Edwards, A. A., Wood, S. G., Joyner, R. E., Becker, B. J., ... & Beal, B. (2020). The prevalence of dyslexia: A new approach to its estimation. Journal of learning disabilities, 53(5), 354–365. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219420920377

Which is more complicated, reading or listening?