Reading is a language-based skill, even when examining word-decoding skills. Decoding and reading comprehension skills become more and more automatized as a child gets older and becomes more proficient in reading. In the simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990), listening comprehension is one of the primary components of reading comprehension. Often listening comprehension has been measured only through vocabulary. Other more complex aspects of language, such as the higher level language skills, inferencing, and comprehension monitoring, have not necessarily been examined. More recent research, however, acknowledges that listening comprehension is a set of complex and dynamic skills that require a variety of lower and higher level language and cognitive processes including vocabulary, grammar, inferencing, and background knowledge (Cain, Oakhill, & Bryant, 2004; Florit, Roch, Altoe, & Levorato, 2009; Language and Reading Research Consortium, in press). Given that one of the primary components of reading comprehension is listening comprehension, increasing our knowledge of how it develops, what predicts performance in listening comprehension tasks, and how to assess it will help us understand reading comprehension in more depth. In addition, improving knowledge should help us in identifying which listening comprehension components are malleable and therefore can be targeted in intervention, which, in turn, should improve reading comprehension. Research suggests that by improving listening comprehension, we can improve reading comprehension (Clarke, Snowling, Truelove, & Hulme, 2010; Garner & Bochna, 2004); however, more research is needed regarding specific factors that impact listening and reading comprehension such as age, which readers benefit the most under what conditions, and which skills should be targeted.

The following set of articles are the product of research that the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, funded in 2010 as part of the Reading for Understanding initiative to improve the knowledge base for reading compre-hension from prekindergarten through high school. It funded six projects across the United States to study reading comprehension measures, development, predictors and constructs, and interventions. Across projects, the role of listening comprehension was fundamental in understanding reading comprehension. The studies in the current Topics in Language Disorders issue focus primarily on oral language skills and to some extent listening comprehension. The first two studies address assessment and predictors of listening comprehension; the second set of studies address interventions for improving listening comprehension with the aim of improving reading comprehension in struggling readers.

Early identification of children at risk of reading difficulties is crucial in preventing significant academic failure. However, most of the research on early identification has focused on word-decoding difficulties and their precursors, such as phonemic awareness, and few studies address the identification of preschoolers at risk of compre-hension difficulties secondary to listening comprehension difficulties. Given the importance of listening comprehension in predicting reading comprehension and how that predictive ability becomes stronger as children get older and more proficient in reading (Adlof, Catts, & Little, 2006; Catts, Adlof, & Weismer, 2006), identifying those at risk early before they start reading is critical to ensure appropriate early interventions. Alonzo, Yeomans-Maldonado, Murphy, Bevens, & Language and Reading Research Consortium (LARRC) (2016) address this issue in their study. They examined how prekindergarten listening comprehension and oral language skills predicted listening comprehension difficulties in second grade in a sample of middle-income children. They examined the role of vocabulary, grammar, inferencing skills, working memory, attention, and general intelligence. The authors used multiple indicators to form a listening comprehension factor. Their results showed that prekindergarten listening comprehension skills predicted second-grade listening comprehension skills. Furthermore, results indicated that a sentence imitation task (that fit better under the construct of memory rather than grammar) and a narrative comprehension measure were the best predictors of listening comprehension in second grade. Surprisingly, scores on vocabulary knowledge and grammar did not predict significant variance in listening comprehension.

Results from Alonzo et al.'s study suggest that we can identify children at risk of reading compre-hension in preschool using simple story compre-hension and sentence repetition tasks. Several measures are available for such purposes. Clinicians can address listening comprehension skills in intervention, which, in turn, should help reduce reading comprehension difficulties in later grades.

Addressing slightly older students, Sabatini et al.'s (2016) study examined a new tool that they developed for reading comprehension assessment that uses listening comprehension in kindergarten pre-readers and first-grade early readers. Their model of reading comprehension assessment includes integrated components that target print, sentence-level information, discourse-level information, conceptual skills, and social intent. Furthermore, they adapted the measure for younger children, who are not yet reading fluently, by addressing listening comprehension. Therefore, this tool could possibly identify those at risk for reading comprehension difficulties prior to the time they can read fluently. This assessment uses a situational based assessment on a tablet digital platform. The situational based assessment targets the children's background knowledge through a story or informational text and examines background knowledge, inferencing, and literal comprehension in addition to vocabulary. The tool employs an integrated approach to the different components of reading.

The purpose of Sabatini et al.'s study was to examine the feasibility of such an approach in young prereaders in a manner that was aligned to reading comprehension in older students and to determine its validity and reliability by grade. If feasible and valid, this tool would allow educators and related professionals to determine which children are at risk for reading comprehension difficulties as early as kindergarten. The format of reading the text aloud, along with the written format, allows younger children to read along while they listen to the text read to them. Moreover, by using a similar format and theoretical framework across grades, investigators were able to examine oral and reading comprehension. The results from this study indicated that this is a promising tool. There were differences in performance by grade. Furthermore, their results indicated that there is considerable variability in children's background knowledge, which, in turn, is a strong predictor of performance in children's listening and reading comprehension, even after controlling for grade, as Alonzo et al.'s article demonstrated. In addition, the authors found that there was a steep learning curve in reading (at least in their measure), indicating that situational based assessment is a promising method of reading and listening comprehension assessment.

The next two studies in this issue, one with young preschool children and one with middle school children, investigated whether listening comprehension is malleable with intervention in children at risk for reading difficulties. Their approaches focused on comprehension at the discourse level. In both programs, higher level language skills were addressed and paid interventionists were used to deliver the treatment and thus the interventionists were well trained and specialized in the treatment. Efficacy of interventions is often measured with proximal and distal measures. Proximal measures resemble the tasks or are closely related to the curriculum or intervention. Distal measures tend to be norm-referenced standardized measures, such as vocabulary or language measures, and thus, they are not closely related to the intervention. As we see in these studies, gains are observable in the proximal measures but not in the distal measures.

One component of listening comprehension is the ability to monitor understanding to determine whether the information makes sense. Comprehension monitoring ability has been shown to predict reading comprehension, especially in older middle and high school students (e.g., Gersten, Fuchs, Williams, & Baker, 2001; Rand Reading Study Group, 2002). However, research on comprehension monitoring in preschool children is very limited. If effective treatments can be developed for young prereaders, addressing these skills could prevent significant reading difficulties later on.

Kim and Phillips (2016) examined whether listening comprehension monitoring is malleable in a group of low-income prekindergarten children. Comprehension monitoring training has been shown to be effective with older students, for both reading and oral language tasks. Furthermore, Kim (2015, 2016) found that comprehension monitoring accounts for variance in oral language skills in preschool and kindergarten children. Kim and Phillips identified two types of inconsistencies that can occur in texts; (a) external inconsistencies are those that do not match with the children's background knowledge, and (b) internal inconsistencies are those in which the information presented within the text does not match (Cain et al., 2004; Kim, 2015, 2016). In their article in this issue, Kim and Phillips examined the performance of low-income prekindergarten children.

Paid interventionists from the research project provided the comprehension monitoring intervention. Children worked with the interventionist for 5-20 min per day in small groups, 4 days per week, for 8 weeks. The children listened to stories and were asked to identify whether a story made sense. The authors used a scope and sequence of instructions, with easier tasks presented earlier and more difficult tasks presented later. Results of the intervention in comprehension monitoring indicated that the children understood the monitoring task prior to intervention and made significant improvements compared with a randomly assigned control group. In addition, results supported previous findings that external inconsistencies were easier to detect than internal inconsistencies. These results appear promising for helping preschool children with oral language comprehension deficits improve their comprehension monitoring skills and thus reduce the risk of poor academic performance. In addition, the time involved seems reasonable and teachers could readily implement the intervention. At this time, results would need to be replicated using teachers.

In Barth et al.'s (2016) study, investigators focused on improving content knowledge through oral language activities in middle-school struggling readers. These students were primarily from low-income families, with 35% of children identified with special needs. Their language intervention focused on lower and higher level language skills such as inferencing, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension. Trained interventionists paid by researchers provided the intervention. The students received intervention 40 min per day, 4 times per week, for a total of 22 hr of instruction. The students were asked to identify key words and main ideas, summarize text, and integrate information across texts. Results indicated that children in the experimental group scored significantly higher on experimenter-developed measures of listening comprehension, vocabulary, and key word main ideas than the randomly assigned control group, but there were no significant effects on standardized measures of these skills.

Results across intervention studies indicate that listening comprehension in general, as well as lower and higher level language skills are malleable and children respond well to intervention. However, significant effects were not shown on distal measures. Possible reasons may be that the dosage of the interventions is not sufficient to impact these measures, and thus, the children may need more ongoing, year-to-year interventions that have strong and cumulative effects on listening and reading comprehension. However, distal measures are typically not designed for progress monitoring but rather to capture yearly achievement or to identify learning or language disorders. Across studies, there is a need to understand whether the distal measures are relevant and necessary. Some distal measures are high-stakes measures, whereas others indicate whether the child moves from an atypical or low-performing range to a more typical performance on reading or language. The mismatch occurs between the purpose of the measures and the interventions. Therefore, the question remains as to whether a 22-hr intervention delivered in a few months changes performance on a distal measure that is designed for identifying a language disability? Nevertheless, the intent of intensive interventions is to move at-risk children closer to the typical range or growth.

One issue to consider in intervention is whether trained personnel or teachers deliver them. The two intervention studies in this issue (Barth et al., 2016; Kim & Phillips, 2016) showed significant effects when trained interventionists delivered them (e.g., Clarke et al., 2010; Garner & Bochna, 2004). However, training teachers to deliver these interventions has high costs in terms of training and intervention time, and teachers who have multiple responsibilities may not have the time or resources to implement them. Furthermore, teacher-delivered interventions often have smaller effect sizes than researcher-delivered interventions (e.g., Cabell et al., 2011). Similarly, adding trained personnel may seem to be efficient, but can add to the personnel cost in the schools with limited budgets. Continued research in cost-effectiveness and time efficiency, in addition to the efficacy of the intervention itself, is still needed. Moreover, determining which interventions the teachers can easily adopt with fidelity is important.

In summary, the studies in this issue address one component of the "simple view of reading"-listening comprehension. Alonzo et al.'s (2016) and Sabatini et al.'s (2016) studies suggest that we may be able to determine whether children are at risk for future reading comprehension difficulties by assessing their listening comprehension even before they can read. From the intervention studies, we learned that aspects of listening comprehension are malleable and that we can start to intervene as early as prekindergarten. Moreover, these interventions address discourse-level skills often associated with higher language levels and metalinguistic skills.

-Shelley Gray, PhD

-M. Adelaida Restrepo, PhD

Issue Editors

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