During the process of developing listening comprehension skills, not only is the student task becoming more and more complex and difficult but also the material which is selected should become increasingly complex and difficult. This hierarchical sequence applies to each chapter or unit as well as to the text as a whole. First, the students are given phrases and sentences. Second, they are presented material in the text in connected discourse, i.e., paragraphs and dialogs. After they learn to understand content directly from the material they are learning, they are asked to listen to material which they have already learned, but in new combinations of structure, vocabulary, and subject matter. The students should be ready at this point for graded material at essentially their level of linguistic comprehension. The students then proceed to material that was meant for native speakers, but which is typified by a linguistic simplicity. At the final stage, the students are able to comprehend the general sense of unstructured material that has not been selected specifically for them.