ABSTRACT
When psychologists have studied long-term memory for things read or heard, they have often tended to ask subjects to remember the precise wording of something, where the "something" in question may be a list of words or a passage of text. The French psychologist Alfred Binet is best remembered nowadays as the creator of one of the first "intelligence" tests for children. But as part of his broader research into child development he studied children's recall of passages of text. Once a structured representation has been created, it is then linked to existing knowledge in long-term memory, thereby expanding and adding to that knowledge. Curtis and Stanovich, Cunningham, and Freeman showed that as children's reading ability improves, listening comprehension improves in tandem. The converse should also be true: improving children's listening skills should have the effect of improving their reading comprehension.
