Accommodating Reading Comprehension with Listening: Good Idea?

listening comprehension reading comprehension accommodations
01 March, 2025
30 Comments

Parent question: My son is 11 years old, and he suffers from dyslexia. I’ve been told you oppose accommodations for dyslexic children. That is irresponsible. I don’t think you understand how these children suffer.

Shanahan responds:

I do oppose some – though not all — accommodations for students with dyslexia.

The purpose of accommodations is to enable people with disabilities to access and participate in activities, jobs, and learning. An accommodation is an alteration to an environment that increases individual access.

Examples of accommodations that I fully support are modifications to curbs to allow those who depend upon wheelchairs to get where they want to go. Or the provision of large print texts to those with vision problems that can be overcome or minimized by such text. Basically, if access or learning can be enhanced through some alteration of the environment I’m all for it.

But as your letter suggests, there are “accommodations” that I do consider problematic. I often hear from teachers (and sometimes parents) who hope I will endorse replacing reading with listening for kids who struggle with decoding.

I get their thinking: Why should we hurt kids’ feelings by asking them to try to read a science or social studies text when we know they find reading itself to be hard?

Obviously, our purpose is not to make these kids feel bad. But it is – or at least should be – to teach students to read. Accommodations that prevent or limit learning are a bad idea.

There is no question that providing audio versions of text will make those texts more accessible to many students with reading disabilities.

What such an accommodation cannot do is help these students read any better. Comprehending while reading is a different game than comprehending while listening. They both have value, but they are not the same thing. One should not be allowed to take the place of the other.

Accommodations are protections. They protect kids from being excluded or penalized due to disabilities. As such, accommodations have a role to play in schools and in society generally.

But reducing reading instruction is not an accommodation. Just the opposite. It is an act of exclusion. Replacing reading with listening may seem protective, but it is protecting kids against learning.

These days I hear from teachers who love the idea of replacing reading instruction or reading assignments with products like Audible. They usually aren’t focused on kids with disabilities, just garden variety struggling and reluctant readers.

These teachers often seem to assume that reading and listening are interchangeable, that gains in one generalize to the other.

These beliefs are not supported by research, however.

First, there are a slew of studies that find big differences between reading and listening. These studies suggest that these abilities have only about 40% shared variance (e.g., Silinkas, et al., 2024; Wolf, et al, 2019). That’s not nothing, but it suggests the unlikelihood that the teaching of one will automatically transfer to the other.

(I’m not satisfied with this 40% figure. To my way of thinking, the major outcome of such studies has been an increased appreciation of the complexity inherent in trying to measure oral and written comprehension in analogous ways. It has turned out to be a very complicated problem).

Even if we accept that figure, it is important to remember that is a correlational estimate (a squared correlation in fact). The way to think about that 40% is: “IF there is a causal relationship between these variables, then 40% is an estimate of how much effect one of these may have on the other.” In other words, knowing that two variables are related does not prove that teaching one will have an impact on the other.

For that, we turn to experimental studies – studies in which listening comprehension is taught, with the impact being measured through reading comprehension. It turns out that there are few such studies and even fewer that report any cross over benefits (e.g., van den Bos, et al., 1998; van Zeijts, et al., 2023).

Teaching listening comprehension should have a place in our schools. Replacing reading instruction and practice with listening comprehension is a bad idea, however.

I appreciate that many folks who seek reading accommodations for their kids are thinking more about testing situations than instructional ones.

Is it okay to replace reading with listening when we are evaluating reading comprehension, such as on state tests?

Given the important differences between reading and listening noted above, that elementary students usually have better listening than reading comprehension (that eventually shifts for most of us), and that those tests are meant to identify how well our kids can read with comprehension, I would argue against that testing modification.

However, replacing reading with listening is not the only possible accommodation in such testing situations.

Research has found that allowing – or encouraging – these students to read test texts aloud rather than silently improves their performance significantly (Giuisto & Ehri, 2019).

One thing that I like about that approach is that it is an accommodation that is under the control of the student rather than the adults. That means that it does more than take away an impediment to performance. It empowers students to minimize or solve the problem.

Another thing I like about it that is it is something that any reader could do in any real reading situation – reading a textbook in a dorm room or doing a work task in one’s cubicle.

Let’s not replace reading comprehension instruction with listening comprehension, and let’s use reading centered accommodations when we are testing reading comprehension.

References

Giusto, M., & Ehri, L. C. (2019). Effectiveness of a partial read-aloud test accommodation to assess reading comprehension in students with a reading disability. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 52(3), 259-270. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219418789377

Silinskas, G., Gedutiene, R., Torppa, M., & Raiziene, S. (2024). Simple view of reading across the transition from kindergarten to grade 1 in a transparent orthography. Scientific Studies of Reading, 28(1), 60-78. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2023.2220848

Wolf, M. C., Muijselaar, M. M. L., Boonstra, A. M., & de Bree, E. H. (2019). The relationship between reading and listening comprehension: Shared and modality-specific components. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 32(7), 1747-1767. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-018-9924-8

van den Bos, Kees P., Brand-Gruwel, S., & Aarnoutse, C. A. J. (1998). Text comprehension strategy instruction with poor readers. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 10(6), 471-498. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007976225000

van Zeijts, Brechtje E. J., Ganushchak, L. Y., de Koning, B. B., & Tabbers, H. K. (2023). Stimulating inference-making in second grade children when reading and listening to narrative texts. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-023-10463-x

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Comments

See what others have to say about this topic.

Wanda Steuri Mar 01, 2025 01:50 PM

I respectfully disagree. I also encourage dyslexic children to read and comprehend as much as possible. Where I disagree is when considering the fact that dyslexic children typically are unable to keep up with their peers in the amount of content reading due to the slower rate. If this accommodation is not used, the students are at a risk of learning less of this content. This is a life-altering disadvantage. Stating that this accommodation should not be used as an accommodation for students with dyslexia has the potential of causing them irreparable harm.

Patty Duncan Mar 01, 2025 02:25 PM

I am just beginning to truly study the dyslexic population and reading accommodations. I know others may disagree with your statements and I understand their concern; however it my observation that the disagreement may be an emotional response rather than a reality response. In contemplating your statements, I agree in many ways with what you are saying, but again still understanding the arguments. My mission is to address the issue. My current position as Education Director at Vooks gives me an opportunity to perhaps make accommodations available to dyslexic readers that address all concerns.

As an educator, I have long followed your work and it is greatly influenced my teaching - thank you!??. I am wondering if you might take a look at Vooks at https://www.vooks.com/ and let me know what you think. I am just entering into research partnering with Eric Theissen at Carnegie Mellon to use Vooks in a school with dyslexic students to evaluate the efficacy of Vooks for that population. I would be honored to know your opinion.

Thanks for all you do for the education of our children.

Patty Duncan

Susan Mar 01, 2025 02:36 PM

What are your thoughts about having a read-aloud accommodation for non-reading tests, like math/science?

Timothy Shanahan Mar 01, 2025 02:39 PM

Susan--
If the purpose of the test is to figure out how well the student can do math or how much he/she knows about science, then reading the material aloud makes sense (since the decoding problem could obscure what you are trying to determine). But if the purpose is to see how well the student can read or to teach reading, then reading the text aloud to the student is a barrier rather than a support.
tim

Jennifer L Collins Mar 01, 2025 07:53 PM

Hello! I'm a literacy specialist, relatively new to my current school. We have an issue that seems related to what you speak of here. It is also the number one reason I want to pull my hair out most days. The district requires grade-level common assessments every few weeks. We have a pretty large number of 3rd-6th grade students (SPED identified and not) who simply do not have the foundational skills to even access most of the text nor the questions on these assessments. We are working on that with a new foundational skill program K-2 and hoping to see less of these students in the future. In the meantime, I discovered teachers had been reading the assessment to those students then having them select the answers and basing their grades on listening. I was horrified. After speaking with the staff, the teachers explained that they felt uncomfortable having the kids sit there, disengaged and guessing, failing so many students. They further explained how they believed it was important to still assess their ability to use whatever strategy (infer, compare, etc.) that was the focus of the assessment. I explained that, as, teachers of reading, it's our job to help them do that thinking based on information gained from reading a text; often kids can already infer and compare, etc. but they must know how to do that based on the information they gain from reading the words. The district guidance is to give the test and the resulting score and use the assessment as a teaching tool. I am concerned about the large amount of time, in our already super-short day, kids are not actually reading on these test days. I suggested giving the assessment, letting them try, but once we know they are not engaged, trying to use that time for a small-group phonics or fluency lesson. They said logistically not possible, to test and teach at the same time. I suggested providing a test over the same strategy but more accessible (lower Lexile) so at least the kids are reading something independently at that time. I'm torn between the kids needing to be in grade-level text and text they can make sense of independently. Of course, there are things that need to change systemically, but this is our reality right now. Teachers ask but I'm unsure how to guide with this particular issue. However, I would prefer the teachers not read the assessments to the students at all on testing day. Might there be an alternative?
Perhaps, as you mention in the article, might it be helpful to just give the grade-level assessment but make sure those kids are reading aloud what they can? Thanks.

Cristine Carrier Schmidt Mar 02, 2025 01:04 AM

I appreciated this piece and reading the research cited (unfortunately, two of them were inaccessible behind paywalls). It is particularly concerning when offer an "audiobook" or "read-aloud" accommodation results in less of a feeling of urgency when it comes to remediation. Unfortunately, I have seen this many times.

As an interventionist, I am often working with students who are 3 or more grades behind in reading, and who are not able to access grade level curriculum or age- and interest-level appropriate literature without basic decoding, fluency, and working memory issues severely interfering with comprehension. It's not a matter of well, if we don't give them the accommodations, then they will get more practice, even if it's hard. It's an issue of the material simply being inaccessible to the student at the current moment. In order to facilitate access to the curriculum, including exposure to new vocabulary (something that was cited repeatedly as important to both listening and reading comprehension in these studies), I almost never recommend audiobook or read aloud only, but will often recommend the use of an immersion reading program like Learning Ally _at the same time_ as making sure the student is engaging in a serious remediation effort to help the student close the gap. I noticed that none of the studies you cited considered immersion reading (where the student sees the text highlights as they simultaneously hear the text read aloud). Given that immersion reading involves simultaneous listening comprehension with text exposure, it seems like it may be qualitatively different than audiobooks alone, and thus it may be hard to apply any of the cited research to this situation? I am realizing that I have never actually done a literature review on immersion reading, and should probably do so ASAP, if there is any literature on this. In your opinion, should immersion reading (I believe this is also what Lori Josephson was referring to) be considered as the same as listening comprehension rather than involving any reading skills, or somewhere in between? Would you be less hesitant to recommend immersion reading as an accommodation vs just audiobooks/read aloud?