Read Charlotte Listening Comprehension Resource Center

Developing strong listening comprehension skills during, and beyond, the early elementary grades will support students’ reading comprehension ability. Learn about, teach, and assess listening comprehension using the Read Charlotte Listening Comprehension Resource Center. 

Cheerful female teacher helping girl with homework in classroom, black schoolgirl writing in notebook, sitting at desk with classmates on background

This path is for educators looking for resources they can immediately begin using to focus on building students’ listening comprehension skills without changing how their instructional minutes are currently distributed or (financial) resources are allocated. 

This pathway is for educators looking to transform their literacy practice to include an explicit focus on listening comprehension and assessment. These resources likely require adjusting the distribution of instructional minutes and additional financial resources.

Master Listening Comprehension Skills in the Classroom

Listening comprehension is one of two primary processes that contribute to successful reading comprehension. Teaching these skills early, intentionally, and concurrently with word reading, can develop strong reading comprehension.

Listening Comprehension is comprised of a set of higher- and lower- level language skills. The higher-level language skills include: inference, perspective-taking, reasoning, comprehension monitoring, and text structure knowledge. The lower-level language skills are: vocabulary, and grammatical/syntactic knowledge. Learn more and find resources aligned to each skill below.

The Research aka
Knowledge Base

Advances in reading science since 2000 offer important contributions to our understanding of how children learn to read and how adults teach children to read. We now know that listening comprehension plays a crucial role in students’ reading comprehension.

The Knowledge Base offers a curated set of recent evidence-based research findings intended to help practitioners better understand listening comprehension and its connection to other literacy skills (such as word reading, reading fluency, background knowledge, and reading comprehension).

Search the Materials Directory

Filter by listening comprehension skill, grade, and/or standard (NC ELA Anchor Standard an/or NC PK Early Foundations for Early Learning and Development), to find resources to target listening comprehension in the classroom. 

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Activity 168
Assessment 5
Intervention 4
Platform 6
Practice 2
Resource 5
Routine 15
Strategy 11
Supplemental Curriculum 7
Tool 11
In this activity students will identify cause and effect relationships throughout a read aloud. This activity can be modified so students are only engaging with oral text responding through discussion.
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The Learn to Listen, Listen to Learn strategy provides students with the opportunity to engage in rich discussion about a topic.
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Students analyze words and how they are related to one another.
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Students identify features of an expository text.
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LanguageScreen is an early language assessment developed by the University of Oxford that measures Expressive Vocabulary, Listening Comprehension, Receptive Vocabulary, and Sentence Repetition.
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In this activity, students group words into categories based on their meaning.
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Students will practice matching definitions with corresponding words.
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This site has information, examples and resources on knowledge-building instructional strategies.
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In this activity students identify the main idea of an expository text by categorizing the information within the text.
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In this activity students compare and contrast characters in narrative/fiction texts.
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In this activity students examine the meaning of vocabulary words.
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This site has information, examples, and resources for teaching syntax and grammar.
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Who We Are

Read Charlotte is a community literacy initiative that unites educators, community partners, and families to improve children’s reading from birth to third grade.

We don’t run programs. We are a capacity-building intermediary that supports local partners to apply evidence-based knowledge about effective reading instruction and interventions, high-quality execution, continuous improvement, and data analysis to improve reading outcomes.

Read Charlotte is a civic initiative of Foundation For The Carolinas.

Assorted images showing Read Charlotte working in the community

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