A study investigated the immediate recall protocol as a means of determining what second language learners retain of a spoken text. Three factors in comprehension were considered: topic familiarity, topic accessibility, and topic structure. A dialogue, a news broadcast, and a popular song were all presented to groups of beginning-level students of German, who were then asked to write down, in English, all they could remember of the texts. Students were then asked to listen to and report on any one of the texts again. Two groups had no prior information about the texts, and two groups had varying amounts of printed information about them. Results show that increasing amounts of information produced statistically significant differences in student performance. It is concluded from these findings that: (1) students should be encouraged to listen to the full text and not interrupt the listening process, (2) the protocol is useful as a measure of text comprehensibility, and (3) comprehension increases with the appropriateness of the task presented. (MSE)