Are story retelling and story generation connected to reading skills? Evidence from Finnish

Abstract

This three-year follow-up study investigated the associations of narrative and reading skills in typically developing Finnish children. Twenty children performed narrative retelling and story generation tasks twice, at five and eight years of age. Reading comprehension and word recognition tests were performed at the age of eight. Narratives were analysed for relevant information, total number of word tokens, clausal density and evaluation. The results showed increased narrative abilities with age, but the development was not seen in all narrative variables. This suggests that narrative tasks might capture development somewhat differently. Both narrative tasks were connected to reading skills. However, while retelling was connected to reading comprehension only, story generation related to both reading comprehension and word recognition. This study extends prior research by showing that not only retelling but also story generation is associated with reading.

The concurrent and longitudinal relationship between narrative skills and other language skills in children

“…Consequently, different narrative task procedures may yield different results. It is important to emphasize, however, that previous studies have found moderate-to-strong correlations between different aspects of retelling and story generation (Mäkinen et al, 2018;Westerveld & Moran, 2013).…”

“…The Renfrew Bus Story Test (Renfrew, 1997) is a retelling task in which a child is told a story about a 'naughty bus' while looking at 12 corresponding pictures of how the bus behaved. The scaffolding given using pictures and a model story (Heilmann et al, 2010) might be beneficial for young children's narrative production (see Berman, 1988) and appears to be effective based on the results of previous studies (Bishop & Edmundson, 1987;Mäkinen et al, 2018). Immediately afterwards, the child is asked to retell the story while looking at the pictures.…”

“…Discourse-level skills such as narrative production involve a range of skills, including the understanding of stories and mastery of pragmatics, syntax and semantics (Suggate et al, 2018). Previous studies have found relationships between various aspects of narrative proficiency and children's comprehension (Cain, 2003;Kim et al, 2005;Mäkinen et al, 2018), indicating that measures of narrative retell and comprehension capture common discourse-level skills (Kim et al, 2015).…”

“…Inspired by previous studies (e.g. Bishop & Edmundson, 1987;Heilmann et al, 2010), we chose narrative retell as a measure of narrative skills to encourage the 4-year-old children in our sample to produce more complex narratives (Heilmann et al, 2010) with more syntactically complex utterances (Mäkinen et al, 2018). Narrative retell appears to be a rather reliable way of measuring narrative skills for young children who might not have the experience, knowledge or cognitive maturity to tell a self-generated story at demand (e.g.…”

“…Furthermore, storytelling appears to develop interdependently, thereby influencing other language and literacy skills (Bishop & Edmundson, 1987;Stothard et al, 1998), including higher order language skills such as listening and reading comprehension (e.g. Cain, 2003;Kendeou et al, 2009;Kim et al, 2015;Mäkinen et al, 2018;Suggate et al, 2018). The claim has further been made that narrative skills are a more sensitive marker of persistent language problems than are other language measures, such as vocabulary or grammar (Bishop & Edmundson, 1987;Pankratz et al, 2007;Vandewalle et al, 2012).…”