The Interplay of Silent Reading, Reading-while-listening and Listening-only

Leading scholars (Gilbert, 2009; Walter, 2008) have highlighted the importance of phonological processing in learning to read. Nevertheless, reading in Japan has traditionally been taught without adequate attention to the role of phonological processing. Accordingly, it was speculated that Japanese university students would demonstrate superior reading comprehension to listening comprehension skills. This study consists of two trials. The first was a comparison of the comprehension of the same text by three classes of 33, 32, and 44 students respectively, in three different modalities: silent reading, reading-while-listening, and listening only. The second was a retrospective longitudinal study of a class of twenty-one students who performed reading-while-listening and listening-only over a fifteen-week semester. The first study confirmed that the students’ reading comprehension exceeded their listening comprehension. In the second study, students were evenly divided as to whether they preferred reading-while-listening or listening-only.

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