Teaching Narrative Comprehension Strategies to First Graders

Paris, A. H., & Paris, S. G. (2007). Teaching Narrative Comprehension Strategies to First Graders. Cognition and Instruction, 25(1), 1-44. doi: 10.1080/07370000709336701

Background

The authors highlighted that, although researchers had identified and addressed children’s early decoding difficulties, there had been little research that demonstrated the course of children’s comprehension development.

Aims

The authors aimed to investigate whether narrative strategy instruction (NSI) delivered in classrooms could enhance the comprehension of first-grade children.

Sample

The participants included 123 students from six first-grade classrooms.

Method

Four of the classrooms (n = 83 children) were randomly assigned to the experimental NSI condition, and two classrooms (n = 40 children) in the comparison condition (CC) received comparable time with non-narrative activities over five weeks. All the participants received a Narrative Comprehension (NC) assessment before and after the intervention.
The NC assessment comprised six parts (Picture Walk; Retelling; Prompted Comprehension; Picture Sequencing; Title Generation; Aural Cloze) that yielded nine different scores:

a. Picture Walk;

b. Retelling—Narrative Elements (Content);

c. Retelling— Narrative Elements (Order);

d. Retelling—Length;

e. Explicit Comprehension;

f. Implicit Comprehension;

g. Picture Sequencing;

h. Title Relevance; and

i. Aural Cloze

Findings

The results demonstrated that the experimental group displayed improved recall and organization of main story elements, better understanding of explicit pictorial information, improved listening comprehension, and better inferences about implicit pictorial information, as compared to the control group. Three NC task variables – retelling—length, picture walk, aural cloze – showed equal increases over time in both NSI and CC conditions. No differential patterns of development were evident between students who, at the start of the intervention, had stronger or weaker phonemic awareness, decoding skills, comprehension, vocabulary, oral language, motivation, or reading achievement. This indicated that teachers needed to design reading practices that would promote narrative thinking skills for all children regardless of their abilities to decode. However, the positive effects of the instruction on comprehension of narrative information did not generalize to comprehension of expository information.

Implications

The authors highlighted that as the students received comprehension tasks that did not require decoding skills, this study did not demonstrate how reading comprehension could have been impacted by the intervention. This link could be established in additional research to examine whether early narrative interventions facilitated learning to read and the development of reading comprehension. The authors also suggested that it would be possible to apply a developmental framework to NSI in classrooms where developmentally appropriate materials and instructional practices could be adapted for the needs and skill levels of the child.

Original article retrieved from Taylor & Francis.