Listening to stories, and talking with others about stories, have always been recognised as pleasurable activities for people of all ages. Activities that combine listening to stories and having conversations about the story can provide authentic and enjoyable opportunities in classrooms for teachers to observe and support students’ development in listening, talking and comprehending. A series of longitudinal research studies of young children’s developing knowledge and skills in literacy have been conducted at the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) over the past decade. One of the significant challenges of this work has been to create opportunities for listening and speaking that can be replicated in different classrooms in order to collect samples of the rich evidence required for this research.