I am currently building for a minimum SDK of 10, so I have to use the android-support-v7-appcompat library to implement ActionBar. I h
ListActivity hasn't been ported to AppCompat. Probably because you should consider it 'deprecated', and instead use a ListFragment.
Fragments will work with a ActionBarActivity, just make sure they are fragments from the support library.
Have a read through this link about fragments.
For your use case, I would just define the fragment in xml.