In the two major sections of this paper the influence of John B. Carroll and Robert Lado on the teaching and testing of listening comprehension since 1961 is examined. The first section reviews the literature of that field and outlines four major periods roughly corresponding to the methodological orientation dominating professional thinking at the time. They include: the era of discretion (1961-1968), in which language learning was viewed as a set of empirical phenomena reducible to manageable and definable segments; the era of cognition (1969-73), which stressed the learner's understanding of what he was doing as he practiced elements of the target language; the threshhold era (1974-81), which emphasized the functions of language in realistic situations; and the proficiency era (1982-1986), which focused on what speakers actually do with language in various specific situations, for various reasons, with various degrees of accuracy. The second section proposes and discusses the immediate recall protocol, a technique for listening comprehension test item development which is based on the testing insights gained during that 25-year period and which seems to focus the principles elaborated by Carroll and Lado. The protocol involves having learners listen to a foreign language text and write down, in their native language, everything that they can remember about the text. A list of references, sample texts and test items, and a selective bibliography are appended. (MSE)