Listening

The app reads a passage aloud, your child listens and answers questions — without seeing the words. Parents get a report they can correct.

Listening is the mirror image of reading practice. Instead of your child reading aloud while the app listens, the app reads aloud while your child listens — and then asks a few questions about what they heard. It is listening comprehension (聆听理解) — not the school oral exam, which is reading aloud and conversation. For a while the menu called it Oral; it no longer does — and talking out loud with Jas is a different feature, Oral Practice.

They never see the words. That is the whole point: the moment the text is on screen it stops being a listening check and becomes a reading one.

Doing one

1. Open Listening from the menu.
2. Pick something under What to listen to. One is already chosen for you — the app skips past anything that looks like a title or contents page — but you can pick another.
3. Tap Start listening. It gets the questions ready first, then plays the passage.
4. Answer the questions, then tap I'm finished.

You get You got 3 of 4 right, and the passage appears underneath, so your child can read what was actually said. The question-by-question detail is on the parent's report, below.

Play it again repeats the passage, as many times as your child needs. Nothing is taken away for using it — the app simply records how many times it played, which is useful to know when you look back at a result.

Try another one starts a fresh passage.

Where the passages come from

From your own library: a book your child has not read yet. That is deliberate — a story they have already read aloud would test their memory rather than their listening. Word lists and spelling lists are never offered; there is nothing in a list to comprehend.

Usually it is the whole book, read straight through. A picture-book page on its own is only a line or two, which is too little to ask a fair question about — the story as a whole has a beginning, a middle and an end, so questions like "what happened next?" have real answers. A book too long to sit through in one go — more than about a minute and a half of listening — is offered a page at a time instead.

So if the screen says there is nothing to listen to, it is not a fault. It usually means every book on the shelf has been read, or that what is left is word lists. Add another book and it will have something to offer again. See Your family library.

Why the questions are not in the book's language

The questions come in the app's own display language, not the language of the passage. A child who understood the story perfectly but cannot yet read a written question in that language would otherwise be marked wrong for the wrong reason — so the score measures listening, and only listening.

The report

Every finished run appears in Family activity as a Listening row — the child, the book, 3 of 4 right and how many times the passage was played. View on that row opens the report; there is no other way in, and it is not on any portfolio, because folding a listening score into the reading figures would put it inside graphs it does not belong to.

The report shows:

• the score, and under it whether the passage was Read by a voice on your child's device or Read by the same voice every child hears;
• How to read this score — a reminder, on every report, that the questions and the answers were written by AI from the passage, that it is right most of the time but not always, and that the passage below is exactly what your child heard;
• Read by the device, when it was: a voice installed on your child's own device may sound different from the one elsewhere, so a wrong answer should mean they did not understand, not that they could not make out the words;
• Questions — each one with a tick, a cross, or a dash for a question that was never answered, and the answer your child chose;
• What they heard — the full passage, last, so it can be read against the answers.

This run doesn't count appears on a run that could not be scored because the passage could not be read aloud in a voice we are willing to test a child on. The questions still show which ones were missed.

Correcting a mark

(Family Manager or Parent — never the child.) If an answer was marked wrong and you can see from the passage that it was right, tick Correct beside it; untick to take a correction back. The score at the top follows as you go, You changed this mark appears under the question, and Save corrections keeps it. A question your child skipped cannot be marked correct.

Once a correction has moved a mark, the report says You changed a mark and that the score above is yours rather than the one the AI gave. Zen Reader keeps both, and so does Export your data: the Listening answers spreadsheet has an AI marked correct column and a Parent marked correct column, with who corrected it and when.

Reassign… on the report moves a run recorded on the wrong login to another child, as it does for every other kind of activity.

When it cannot run

"No voice for this language." The passage is spoken by the same voice the app uses for read-aloud, so it needs a voice installed for that book's language. If the device has none, there is nothing to listen to. Install a voice for that language in the device's own settings and come back. See Settings.

"Questions are pitched at a middle level." Zen Reader matches question difficulty to how hard the book is, and it can only do that for languages it has a reading level for. For the others the questions sit in the middle rather than being tuned to the child.

"We could not make questions from that one. Try a different passage." Sometimes a passage yields no questions — it was too short, or it read as a title page or a table of contents rather than a story. Pick another.

Nothing happens at all. Writing the questions is one of the things Zen Reader sends off the device, and there is no version of it that runs on your own device. If your family has turned AI features off, this activity cannot get its questions ready. The switch is Settings → AI features, and only the Family Manager can change it.