Listening Comprehension in Primary Level Grades Two,Four and Six

Aspects of listening comprehension skills in second-, fourth- and sixth-grade students (n=107) were investigated. The design employed the Sentence Verification Technique (SVT). Participants listened to three narrative and three expository passages, which had been recorded onto a CD, together with test sentences. Compared to the narrative passages, the expository material was more difficult to understand. Girls systematically scored higher than boys on all measures of listening comprehension although this sex difference was small and mostly nonsignificant. These results are comparable with previous findings in reading comprehension research. Age-related improvement in listening comprehension was observed with the narrative, but not with the expository passages. Cluster analysis produced four different comprehension strategies: Good Listening, Poor Listening, and two poor strategies previously hypothesised by Royer et al . (1987), viz. Top-down and Verbatim Strategies. The results are discussed from the point of view of their possible practical significance.