I do not know of any formal research concerning listening skills. In my 20 years of teaching students with below 6th grade reading skills, I have observed that you are right on target in the need to develop listening skills as well as decoding skills. Very few of my students reported having a book read to them as a child. They also had little verbal interaction with adults. I also found that their vocabulay was very limited. Most of the time I started with the 500 most frequently used words to develop vocabulary while the student worked on phonics. We also read aloud adult but lower level stories (much like a reading circle in elementary school) and answered the "who, what, where, when, why" questions. This takes a considerable amount of time to develop reading comprehension skills, but has proven successful. 
Even students who qualified for the read aloud test accommodations had to develop the listening skills.
This also has been true of individuals whose first language was not English, and did not have the reading skills in their native language.
Research in this area is definitely needed.Carol Allen 
Career Readiness Certification Director
Rowan Cabarrus Community College
PO Box 1595
Salisbury, NC 28145-1595
704-216-7210 office
704-202-7065 cell
-----Original Message-----
From: <tsticht at znet.com>
Sent 3/27/2008 11:15:13 AM
To: learningdisabilities at nifl.gov
Subject: [LearningDisabilities 1832] Re: technology is the answerRe: technology is the answer
Glenn's proposal for the use of print-to-speech decoding technology to
reform adult literacy education has some merit for adults with very poorly
developed decoding skills. But there is also the question of vocabulary and
comprehension. As the following research note indicates, many adults with
poorly developed reading abilities also lack well developed listening
abilities. For these adults, technology would also have to improve word
knowledge and comprehension of materials being decoded for listening. I
have looked for but not found much research on the listening skills of
adults in adult basic education programs. If anyone has references to this
kind of research I would appreciate learning about them.
Tom Sticht
Research Note                 2 February 2002
Tom Sticht
The "Scientific" Understanding of Reading and the "Reading Potential" of
Adults  Assessed by Measuring Listening and Reading Abilities
The "scientific" work on reading that the National Reading Panel reported
takes its primary focus from the idea that, developmentally,  children
typically acquire considerable competence in listening and comprehending
speech before they develop competence in reading and comprehending the
written language. Indeed, the whole idea behind the teaching of "phonemic
awareness,"  "phonics" and other "word attack" techniques is that the
learner's main task is to learn how to "decode" the written language to
reconstruct the spoken language which can then be comprehended as usual.
This is the idea of reading as a second signaling system for listening to
and comprehending the oral language (for more on aspects of reading that
are not second signaling systems for listening see the paper Teaching
Reading With Adults under Full Text documents at www.nald.ca  searched by
my last name).
The idea that listening competence develops first and that then reading
competence permits the learner to understand in writing that which could
earlier be understood only in the spoken language leads to the concept of
"reading potential." For children, the general notion is that they enter
school at the first grade with two types of receptive communication
abilities: listening and reading (there are, of course, other communication
abilities, but they are not the object of discussion here). Typically,
children can comprehend better by listening than by reading in the primary
grades. Hypothetically for instance, a child in the first grade may
comprehend stories by listening as well as the average third grader can
comprehend the same stories by reading. Thus, the average first graders
listening score can be said to indicate a "reading potential" of the third
grade level, because if the average first grade child could instantly
comprehend by reading as well as he or  she can by listening, they would
have a reading ability comparable to a typical third graders reading
ability.
The concept of "reading potential" is important for adult literacy educators
for at least two reasons. First, whether people are designated as "learning
disabled" or not is frequently  based on the idea that on some measure,
such as an "intelligence" test, the people are at their appropriate age
level or above, but on a reading measure they are one, two or more years
behind. In other words, they are not reading "up to their potential."
Listening tests are one way of assessing people's "reading potential." In
fact, most individually administered intelligence or verbal IQ tests
present questions by speaking to
the person being examined. The person has to listen to receive the questions
and explanations needed to complete the test. Therefore, individual
intelligence tests like the Stanford-Binet, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary
Test, and Wechsler intelligence scales for children and adults can be
thought of largely as listening tests.
The second reason that the concept of "reading potential" is important in
adult literacy education is that it is frequently thought that adults in
need of literacy education have lived a reasonably long time and developed
fairly high levels of competence in oral language, including vocabulary and
comprehension ability for listening. Therefore, it is assumed, unlike
children, whose oral language skills are not well developed yet and who
must acquire higher levels of vocabulary while also learning to read,
adults will be able to acquire a fairly high level of literacy in a brief
time, relative to that required by children.  This leads to the expectation
that the adult's literacy problems may be solved fairly quickly with a
relatively brief period of training in some form of decoding the written
word to utilize the vast amount of competence already possessed in the oral
language.
However, when some 2,000 adults were assessed to compare their skills in
both listening and reading, the anticipated higher level of listening
ability, particularly at the lower levels of reading (down to the 2nd
grade) as indicated by the Gates-MacGinitie reading test, did not emerge
when listening to comprehend paragraphs.
The data mentioned above  were obtained using group administered tests in
which the listening and reading measures were equated as closely as
possible in content, time to listen or read, and difficulty of the
questions, which were all multiple-choice requiring recall of factual
information.
The chapter by Sticht and James (1984) provides an extensive review of
listening and reading studies with adults. In one study, using the same
group test as used to obtain the data  given above,  an incarcerated prison
population of men reading at the 4th grade level showed about 1.5 grade
levels of "potential."
Using a different group administered test of listening and reading skills,
the Durrell Listening and Reading Series tests, Sticht (1978) reported that
for 71 native speakers of English who were in an adult literacy program
their average reading level was at the 4.8 grade level, while their reading
"potential" was 6.0. Interestingly, for 45 adults with English as a second
language, their reading score was 4.8 while their reading "potential" score
was at the 4.4 grade level. In other words, their listening skills were
lower than their reading skills, so when the listening score was converted
to a reading "potential" score, they performed below their actual reading
level!
Using the Diagnostic Reading Scales, which are administered one-on-one as an
individual test, Sticht & Beck (1976) assessed the reading "potential" of 42
native English speakers and 32 English as a second language speakers in an
adult literacy
program. The native speakers had an average reading level at the 6.2 grade
level and a "potential" at the grade 6.4 level. The non-native English
speakers read at an average 4.3 grade level and had a "potential" at the
4.4 grade level.
Generally speaking, the studies cited suggest that adults with lower levels
of literacy tend to also have lower levels of oral language (listening)
comprehension (though note the use of the word "tend" because this is not
true of all adults). This tends to be true for both vocabulary knowledge
and the comprehension of connected discourse. Of course, there can be
important exceptions to these general trend data. But as a rule, these data
on listening and reading suggest that adult literacy educators will have to
provide the least able adult readers (less than 4th grade abilities) with
not only effective instruction in "phonemics","phonics" and other decoding
knowledge, but also extensive opportunities for these adults to develop
lots of new vocabulary and content knowledge to improve both their oral and
written language comprehension abilities.
Reference
Sources for all  of the studies cited above, and many others exploring
listening and reading skills of  adults, may be found in Thomas G. Sticht &
J.  H. James (1984). Listening and Reading. In R. Barr, M. Kamil, and P.
Mosenthal ( Eds.) Handbook of Reading Research. New York: Longmans.
----------------------------------------------------
National Institute for Literacy
Learning Disabilities mailing list
LearningDisabilities at nifl.gov
To unsubscribe or change your subscription settings, please go to http://www.nifl.gov/mailman/listinfo/learningdisabilities
Email delivered to allenc at rowancabarrus.edu
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.nifl.gov/pipermail/learningdisabilities/attachments/20080327/c5c530cb/attachment.html