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Listening Comprehension

Benchmarking and Progress Monitoring for Grades 2-8

Why monitor listening comprehension? Monitoring reading comprehension alone does not give a complete picture of a student's literacy skills. If a student can comprehend text by listening but does poorly when reading, it becomes clear that the student is having trouble with decoding.  This provides teachers with valuable information to address the individual needs of their students.

Readable English improves comprehension by unlocking the code and enabling students to move from learning to read to reading to learn.

Listening is Essential to Literacy

Listening is an essential piece of the literacy construct and a critical skill required for success in school and careers. The Lexile® Framework for Listening is a scientific approach to measuring students’ listening comprehension. 

Better listeners make better readers. A true picture of a student’s literacy lies in understanding both reading and listening skills together.

Listening is a part of many states’ ELA standards, accounting for 20 percent of ELA test scores.


80 percent of what we learn, we learn by listening.




Graduate Management Admission Council’s recent study show that listening ranked second in a list of skills and abilities employers look for in new hires.

Using Student Lexile Listening Measures

View the whitepaper Lexile® Framework for Listening and Building Tools for Success to learn more about the research behind Lexile listening measures.

Readable English students get Lexile® listening measures by taking a listening test that is linked to the Lexile scale. Listening tests include audio passages such as teacher talks, radio reports, narratives and dialogues. The passages reflect content across academic domains – English Language Arts, science, social studies and math – and social language that students are likely to encounter in school. The listening passages are followed by questions that test students’ ability to identify the main idea, details and to make inferences. Upon test completion, students receive a Lexile listening measure, such as a Lexile listening measure of 900L.

Why is Listening an Important Skill?

Watch this video to learn more about the importance of listening. Better listeners make better readers. And listening is not just an academic skill, but a life skill.

Want to Know More?

Our research-proven, accelerated reading program gets students to take ownership of their learning by quickly getting them to grade-level reading and beyond.