Discussing stories: On how a dialogic reading intervention improves kindergartners’ oral narrative construction

Abstract

Oral narrative skills are assumed to develop through parent-child interactive routines. One such routine is shared reading. A causal link between shared reading and narrative knowledge, however, has not been clearly established. The current research tested whether an 8-week shared reading intervention enhanced the fictional narrative skills of children entering formal education. Dialogic reading, a shared reading activity that involves elaborative questioning techniques, was used to engage children in oral interaction during reading and to emphasize elements of story knowledge. Participants were 40 English-speaking 5- and 6-year-olds who were assigned to either the dialogic reading group or an alternative treatment group. Analysis of covariance results found that the dialogic reading children's posttest narratives were significantly better on structure and context measures than those for the alternative treatment children, but results differed for produced or retold narratives. The dialogic reading children also showed expressive vocabulary gains. Overall, this study concretely determined that aspects of fictional narrative construction knowledge can be learned from interactive book reading.

The Development of Narrative Discourse in French by 5 to 10 Years Old Children: Some Insights from a Conversational Interaction Method

“…Finally, together with other dialogical intervention procedures (e.g., Lever and Sénéchal 2011;Makdissi and Boisclair, 2006;Silva et al, 2014), the causal-oriented conversational interaction used in our studies could also be used effectively, over a longer period of time, for remediation purposes, with SLI and autistic children (see, LeNormand, Veneziano et al, 2011, for some preliminary results with SLI children).…”

Talking About the Non-Literal: Internal States and Explanations in Child-Constructed Narratives

“…In some studies, interventions consisted in training sessions repeated frequently over a relatively long period of time (Lever & Sénéchal, 2011;Peterson, Jesso & McCabe, 1999;Whitehurst et al, 1988), while in others the intervention involved one short session in which children were questioned about the causes of the story events and/or the internal state of the characters (Eaton, Collis, & Lewis, 1999;Shiro, 2003;Silva, Strasser & Cain, 2014;Veneziano & Hudelot, 2006Veneziano, 2016). In some studies, the narratives obtained were conversationally co-constructed between the child and the experimenter (e.g.…”

Preschoolers’ Causal Reasoning During Shared Picture Book Storytelling: A Cross-Case Comparison Descriptive Study

“…This reflects the view that narratives involve mental representations of depicted or described situations that include causal connections between various story elements (Van den Broek et al, 2005;Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). Thus, behavior and mental states could be connected to particular events (e.g., someone becoming upset because they are trapped), events from different parts of the story can be connected (e.g., someone slipping and falling because they dropped a banana peel earlier on), single events can have multiple causes (e.g., a wild fire requires a long dry period and a discarded match or cigarette), and a single cause can lead to multiple events (e.g., a flood can destroy buildings, uproot trees, and wash vehicles away) (Van den Broek et al, 2005;Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998 Through constructing narratives, children thus learn to form coherent and meaningful representations that include concepts about causal relationships between various story elements (Lever & Sénéchal, 2011;Paris & Paris, 2003). When children construct narratives that make sense of pictorial stimuli, they also make inferences, form predications, and provide explanations that enable them to form coherent accounts of causally sequenced plots (Paris & Paris, 2003).…”

“…Variations in narrative abilities are also associated with socio-cultural-economic background and home context (Lever & Sénéchal, 2011;Peterson et al, 1999;Schick & Melzi, 2010). Furthermore, the effectiveness of interaction processes depends on social histories and past experiences as well as individual characteristics Downloaded by [Mr Paul A. Kirschner] at 11:38 22 June 2015…”