Leap-frog to literacy: maternal narrative supports differentially relate to child oral language and later reading outcomes

ABSTRACT

Young children’s oral narration typically progresses from telling disordered events to production of well-sequenced stories. To investigate how this development is supported and whether effects of support extend to literacy, 59 mother-child dyads from low-income family backgrounds were studied longitudinally. Maternal verbal input to narration was assessed when children were three, four, and five years old. Children’s personal narratives were assessed at age five, and reading outcomes were measured at first, second, third and sixth grades on a subsample. Maternal support was differentially related to oral narrative and reading outcomes. Mothers first provided orientation information and supported developing story actions and events with their three- and four-year-olds and focused on narrative evaluation with their five-year-olds. Although few distal relations were found between maternal input and children’s oral narrative abilities, several types of maternal support across the preschool years correlated with later decoding, including prompts for and contributions of evaluation.

KEYWORDS:

• Narrative discourse
• sequencing
• literacy
• maternal scaffolding

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr. Alison L. Bailey is Professor of Human Development and Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a developmental psycholinguist studying children’s linguistic, social, and educational development. Her areas of research include first and second language acquisition, early literacy development, and academic language pedagogy and assessment practices. She has authored commercial assessments of early language and literacy development as well as analytical tools for language and literacy characterization. Her most recent book is Progressing Students’ Language Day by Day with Margaret Heritage (Corwin Press).

Dr. Ani C. Moughamian is an Associate Adjunct Professor in the Leadership Department at Saint Mary’s College of California. She teaches both master’s and doctoral level courses predominantly in research methods, focusing on supporting students through the development of their thesis and dissertation literature reviews and designing the methodology for their studies. She has expertise in both quantitative and qualitative methods as well as in language learning and literacy, and is particularly interested in the role of narrative in both reading and cultural development.

Dr. Kimberly Reynolds Kelly is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development at California State University, Long Beach. Her research program focuses broadly on the intersection of language and cognitive development, social-interactive processes, and socio-emotional development in preschool-age children. She has expertise in learning and education, narrative and cognition, discourse development, early childhood language and literacy acquisition, as well as parent-child interactions and attachment.

Dr. Allyssa McCabe is Professor of Psychology at University of Massachusetts, Lowell. She founded a journal, now called Narrative Inquiry, and researches how narrative develops with age, how parents encourage narration, cultural differences in narration, and interrelationships between development of narrative, vocabulary, and phonological awareness. A key concern is assessment of preschool-aged children, especially preventing misdiagnosis of cultural differences in language use as deficits. Recent work involves a theoretical approach to early literacy called the Comprehensive Language Approach, which looks at ways various strands of oral and written language affect each other in acquiring full literacy. Her most recent book is Chinese Language Narration with C. Chang (John Benjamins).

Dr. Becky H. Huang is an Associate Professor in the Bicultural-Bilingual Department at the University of Texas, San Antonio. She is also the coordinator of the MA program in Applied Linguistics/TESOL. Her research areas span across applied linguistics, psychology, and education. She has expertise on topics regarding bilingualism, second language and literacy development, and language assessment.

ORCID

Alison L. Bailey http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9303-8304

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Correlations between reading outcomes at the four grades ranged between r(27) = .674 and r(27) = .907 (all significant at p < .001).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Council for Research, Academic Senate, UCLA.