‘Tell me the whole story’: moving from narrative comprehension to narrative production skills

ABSTRACT

Preschool children’s narrative skills have a positive impact on their future school literacy, their inferential and representational skills, as well as their linguistic and socio-cognitive skills. Therefore, this study examined the impact of an intervention program on preschool-aged children’s understanding of the structure of the stories so that they could produce more coherent ones. The sample consisted of 78 children, aged 5–6 years. The sample children were separated into two groups, one experimental and one control group. The intervention program consisted of five levels of instructions (building background knowledge, model story reading, retelling, monitoring the process and the production of stories). The results showed that the intervention program was effective as, after the intervention, the children of the experimental group demonstrated a significant improvement in the production of stories, whereas the control group showed weaker structures in their narratives.

KEYWORDS:

• Kindergarten
• intervention program
• narrative comprehension
• narrative production
• fictional stories

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).