While listening comprehension is perhaps the most ignored area of the language arts, a review of the literature suggests that it is deserving of more classroom instructional time. Involving the simultaneous orchestration of skills in phonology, syntax, semantics, and knowledge of text structure, listening comprehension seems to be controlled by the same set of cognitive processes as reading comprehension. However, because crossmodal transfer between reading and listening is at best imperfect, teachers cannot expect automatic improvement in listening comprehension through attention to reading comprehension. When instruction occurs in an auditory mode, though, training in many of the same skills generally used in reading comprehension does seem to work. Additionally, since many of the recent investigations in such areas as schema theory and actively negotiating meaning for a text have actually assessed listening comprehension, their instructional implications may be even more applicable to listening than they are to reading. Activities that use students' listening capabilities seem to have potential for improving reading comprehension. Repeated readings and read-along techniques, for example, rely on listening to help students learn to assign appropriate prosodic patterns to text. (Author/FL)