Structured narrative retell instruction for young children from low socioeconomic backgrounds: a preliminary study of feasibility

Abstract

Successful acquisition of literacy depends on adequate development of decoding skills as well as broader, meaning-related knowledge and skills for text comprehension. Children from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds are often challenged in both domains, relative to peers who are not economically disadvantaged. The efficacy of code-focused instructional programs for at-risk preliterate children is well supported, but less evidence is available regarding interventions to improve broader language and comprehension skills. This preliminary study tested the feasibility of a new intervention, “structured narrative retell instruction” (SNRI), and explored its potential to enhance meaning-related knowledge and skills, including vocabulary, listening comprehension, and narrative skills, in pre-literate, low SES children. SNRI used authentic children's books to model comprehension processes, explicitly teach story grammar, and implicitly target microstructural aspects of narratives. Participants included 9 children with a mean age of 60 months, who were randomly assigned to SNRI or to code-focused literacy instruction (CFLI). Each group received 12, 40-min instructional sessions over 6 weeks. Pre- and post-tests were administered to assess vocabulary, listening comprehension, narrative macrostructure and narrative microstructure, as well as alphabet knowledge, phonological awareness, and concepts of print. The feasibility of SNRI was demonstrated by completion of the designed study, moderately high treatment fidelity, and qualitative feedback from interventionists. The SNRI group also made significant gains on 4 of the 7 meaning-related measures (p < 0.10). In comparison, the CFLI group made significant gains on 2 of 7 meaning-related measures. We conclude that SNRI is feasible and shows potential for improving language skills related to comprehension and that further research investigating its efficacy is warranted.

Retelling a model story improves the narratives of Polish-English bilingual children

“…The number of communication units (CU) was significantly higher in the retold stories, which indicates an enhancement in the retelling mode. However, contrary to Adlof, McLeod, and Leftwich (2014), there were no effects of the mode for either of the languages for the TTR, MLU. The model story did not have effects on children's lexical productivity because the retold stories were not richer in vocabulary and the children did not build more complex sentences.…”

“…Since a model story told by an adult introduces complex grammatical and morphological structures not typically found in children's speech, the syntactic and morphological complexity of children's stories may grow. One case in point, for instance, is a study of English-speaking 5-year olds by Adlof, McLeod, and Leftwich (2014), in which the number of types, tokens, and the MLU in the narratives increased after children practised retelling and were provided with explanations of advanced vocabulary. Thus, it has been proposed that having children retell stories may be particularly useful for improving their oral comprehension and expressive vocabulary (e.g.…”

“…Based on the research reviewed above, we expected that providing monolinguals with a model story might bring about positive effects for the lexical measures (e.g. Adlof, McLeod, and Leftwich 2014), but it might also have null effects (e.g. Sénéchal et al 2008) on the monolinguals' retold stories.…”

“…Improvements in storytelling after a model have been reported for monolinguals (Beck and Clarke-Stewart 1998;Isbell et al 2004;Wenner et al 2008;Adlof, McLeod, and Leftwich 2014;Peterson and McCabe 1992;Morrow 1985;Morrow, Sisco, and Smith 1992;Klein, Moses, and Jean-Baptiste 2010;Dunst, Simkus, and Hamby 2012), but to our best knowledge, studies have only seldom focused on bilingual children's storytelling after a model (Gutiérrez-Clellen 2002;Isbell et al 2004;Kunnari, Välimaa, and Laukkanen-Nevala 2016;Licandro 2016;Maviş, Tunçer, and Gagarina 2016). Given that an increasing number of children grow up in bilingual or multilingual settings (Grosjean 1984(Grosjean , 2010 and that bilingual language development poses various challenges, especially in educational and diagnostic contexts (Armon-Lotem, de Jong, and Meir 2015), it is compelling to find out whether strategic adult modelling can enhance bilingual storytelling similarly to monolingual storytelling.…”

“…By the same token, narrative skills can be trained when children are asked to retell stories after models provided by adults (Morrow 1985). This strategy for enhancing storytelling has been used with typically developing children (Adlof, McLeod, and Leftwich 2014), and also with children with language difficulties (Hayward and Schneider 2000;Spencer and Slocum 2010;Westerveld, Gillon, and Miller 2004).…”