Listening comprehension: Retelling stories
Listening skills are an essential part of language development.
Listening to stories is an engaging experience in
the interpretive mode of communication—understanding
spoken and written language (Curtain & Dahlberg 2008).
Retelling a story is an example of the interpretive mode in
which children focus on listening to or reading a short story
before writing their version. Children in the third grade
classroom listen to Ms. Zeynep read a story in the present
tense about a boy and his family. Afterward, she asks
the children to retell something about the story using the
simple past tense. She draws their attention to the tenses