Beyond Questions: A Fellowship of Opportunities for Fostering Preschoolers' Story Comprehension

Abstract

Much attention has been paid to storybook reading as a context for supporting preschoolers' emergent language and literacy. Inferential thinking is essential to listening comprehension and to reading comprehension. Understanding the story deeply and reasoning about events and characters are central to children's enjoyment and to comprehension skills needed for later reading. Preschoolers have capacities for inferential thinking, but little practice‐based instruction, except for asking questions, has resulted from the few studies that have explored inferential talk in teacher–child language interactions. We undertook a pilot project with teachers in economically and racially diverse urban classrooms to examine the effects and components of a professional learning experience to support inferential thinking and story comprehension. The article explains important instructional opportunities for fostering story meaning and inferential thinking by leveraging components before, during, and after a read‐aloud and demonstrates practice‐based examples using children's literature.

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