The Effects of Explicitly Teaching Story Structure to Primary Grade Children

Abstract

The importance of emergent literacy skills as a foundation for proficient reading has led to the development of interventions to teach these skills. These interventions are particularly important for children from disadvantaged homes because they often lack the home literacy experiences necessary for building foundational literacy skills prior to school entry. While previous interventions have been successful in developing literacy skills, noticeably absent has been instruction to develop comprehension. In this study, teachers explicitly taught the narrative structure to kindergarten and first grade children in high poverty schools to increase their comprehension of children's literature. Instruction was delivered as children listened to stories during daily story time. The findings indicate that children who learned story structures recalled more ideas from new stories and answered more questions about structural elements of those stories (e.g., who is the main character?). The results suggest that teachers can deliver effective comprehension instruction to emergent and beginning readers in the context of listening comprehension activities.The project was funded by a grant from the U. S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education grant number 84.324T for model demonstration projects. The authors wish to acknowledge the faculty, students, and administrators of the Altoona Area School District for their participation in and continued support of this project. In particular we would like to thank Tom Kattouf, the director of Special Education, for being the catalyst for this project.Correspondence should be addressed to Robert J. Stevens, Educational Psychology Program, 202 CEDAR Building, Penn State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA. E-mail: rjs15@psu.edu 159 160 STEVENS, VAN METER, WARCHOLAK Resumen La importancia de las habilidades de lectoescritura emergente (emergent literacy) como base para la suficiencia lectora ha llevado al desarrollo de intervenciones para impartir estas habilidades a los niños que comienzan su proceso de aprendizaje de lectura. Estas intervenciones son particularmente importantes para niños de hogares de escasos recursos, pues estos, con frecuencia, carecen de experiencias que fundamenten las habilidades lectoescritoras necesarias para incursar en la escuela. Previas intervenciones han sido exitosas en desarrollar habilidades lectoescritoras, sin embargo, ha sido notable en ellas la ausencia de la enseñanza explícita de la comprensión lectora. En este estudio, un grupo de maestros enseñaron explíci-tamente la estructura narrativa de historias infantiles a niños de kindergarten y primer grado en escuelas con altos grados de pobreza, con el fin de mejorar su comprensión de la literatura infantil. La enseñanza se impartió mientras los maestros leían a los niños las historias durante la hora diaria de lectura. Los hallazgos indican que los niños que aprendieron las estructuras de las historias pudieron recontar más ideas de nuevas historias y pudieron responder a más pregu...

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