Although the listening construct has been defined more widely in order to deal with the issue of lecture retention, these wider definitions suffer from serious conceptual and methodological problems, such as the assumption that receiving behavior is the same regardless of differing situations and messages. However, the literature would indicate that a comprehensive view of listening would include at least five factors: short term listening, short term with rehearsal, interpretive listening, lecture listening, and selective listening. The usual factor-analytic tests have confirmed the statistical independence of these factors, but more interesting are the differing listening "profiles" that result from the testing of different groups of listeners. Three groups (university students, army officers, and high school students) produced specific differences on a listening test for all five listening factors. Each of the scales also has a distinct "profile" with regard to the various ACT measures. This five-factor listening model has a number of immediate utilitarian benefits. First, it provides a comprehensive theoretical model based on fairly well-known memory functions. Second, it provides a comprehensive answer to the problems originally raised and ignored by researchers since the middle 1960s. And, third, it points to new directions in listening research. (HOD)