Abstract

The proposed study investigated the effect of teaching narrative comprehension strategies on the oral narrative abilities of kindergarten children. The sample consisted of 30 children attending two regular kindergarten classes at a French elementary school in the Greater Montreal area. Children from both classrooms were randomly assigned to either a treatment condition or a control condition. Nine books from a children's series written by a single author were used for the intervention. The treatment group received instruction on narrative comprehension strategies using these books. The control group heard the same stories read aloud and participated in general discussions about each story's events, but instruction on comprehension strategies was not provided. The treatment group 'activity sessions' covered, in sequence, four strategies associated with children's narrative skills: analyzing story grammar, recognizing causal relations, identifying characters' internal states, and making predictions about states and events. The final treatment group 'activity session' involved a review of the four strategies and their application to a new story. Pretest and posttest measures of narrative abilities were comprised of a narrative picture sequencing task, responses to narrative comprehension questions, and a narrative retell task. The effect for the story retelling task was significant.