Research undertaken to determine the benefits of extensive listening (i.e., listening to long, easy
texts for fluency and enjoyment) has largely been concerned with native-speaker populations,
particularly early readers in elementary school. Reading stories to children is almost universally
acknowledged as good pedagogy, and when it is done in an environment of shared reading or
recreational reading, it also produces considerable gains in reading and listening skills (Elley,
1989; Senechal & Cornell, 1993). A further benefit of listening to stories is the potential for
acquiring new vocabulary incidentally. In a set of studies conducted by Elley, it was found that
oral story reading constituted a considerable source of vocabulary acquisition, whether or not the
reading was accompanied by teacher explanation of word meanings. Subjects in one group
showed gains of 15% from one story, without teacher explanation; while subjects in a second
group, who did receive teacher explanations, showed gains of 40%. It was further found that
these incidental vocabulary gains were relatively permanent, and that a key predictor of the
successful acquisition of a word was its frequency of recurrence in the story.