Teaching Narrative Comprehension Strategies to First Graders

Abstract

This study provided 5 weeks of direct strategy instruction about narrative elements and relations in 4 first-grade classrooms (n = 83), all with materials that made minimal decoding demands on children's reading. Two comparison classrooms (n = 40) received comparable instruction on language development and poetry. A battery of assessments given at pretest and posttest showed that the intervention benefited children's comprehension of narratives in the picture-viewing modality as well as narrative meaning-making in listening comprehension and oral production modalities. Understanding and recall of main narrative elements improved, as did inference-making skills and understanding the psychological aspects of stories. Implications for enhancing beginning readers’ emerging narrative knowledge in primary grade classrooms are discussed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This manuscript is based on a doctoral dissertation (A. H. Paris, 2003, “The Roots of Reading Comprehension: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Teaching Narrative Comprehension Strategies to Beginning Readers”). We thank Kai S. Cortina for his statistical assistance, the elementary school staff and children who participated in this project, and Denise Larabell and the other research assistants for their help in collecting and analyzing the data.

Notes

^aVariable was not included in repeated measures tests due to a constrained distribution or empirical nonindependence with another variable.

^aThis table only includes information for variables included in the repeated measures tests and for which a significant interaction emerged for either theNC or the EC task.

^b df = 1, 112.

^c df = 1, 111.

^e df = 1, 109.

^d df = 1, 110.

^* p < .05.

^** p < .01.

^*** p < .001.

^a df = 1, 54.

^b df = 1, 56.

^* p < .05.

^** p < .01.

^*** p < .001.

^aThis table only includes information for variables included in the repeated measures tests and for which a significant interaction emerged for either the NP or the EP task.

^b df = 1, 49.

^c df = 1, 46.

^d df = 1, 48.

^** p < .01.

^a df = 1, 110.

^{b b} df = 1, 111.

^c df = 1, 112.

^d df = 1, 109.

^* p < .05.

^***p < .01.

^****p < .001.

^a df = 1, 49.

^b df = 1, 46.

^c df = 1, 48.

^** p < .01.